


Divine Madness

by anactoria



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Ableism, Angst, Canon Divergence, Case Fic, Dean Winchester Big Bang 2017, Dean and Mental Health Issues, Gen, Greek Mythology - Freeform, Mark of Cain, Mental Institutions, Original Character(s), Post-Episode: s10e09 The Things We Left Behind, Season/Series 10, patient abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-24
Updated: 2017-03-24
Packaged: 2018-10-10 03:17:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10427958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anactoria/pseuds/anactoria
Summary: After the events of 10x09, Dean decides he's too dangerous to be allowed to roam free any longer, let alone to hunt. Sam still seems to think he can be saved, and he knows Cas wants to believe it, too, so rather than trust them to keep him on lockdown, Dean gets himself arrested.Life on a secure psych ward is... well, not awesome, but Dean can deal. At least, until patients start dying in mysterious ways and he realizes that getting away from hunting is going to be harder than it seemed. It quickly becomes evident that the deaths are supernatural in origin -- but will hunting down the monster mean Dean ends up becoming one himself?





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is my entry for the 2016/17 [Dean Big Bang](http://deanwbigbang.livejournal.com), and I was lucky enough to score [amberdreams](http://amberdreams.livejournal.com) as my artist! You can check out her stunning illustrations [here](http://amberdreams.livejournal.com/483639.html).
> 
> Many thanks to [frozen_delight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/frozen_delight) for all her beta help! You’re a star. ♥
> 
> I read various personal accounts about life on a psych ward while writing this story, and they varied quite a lot. If I have managed to commit any wild inaccuracies, you have my apologies. Almost everybody in this story, including Dean (especially Dean) has a screwed-up attitude to mental illness. That means there’s both explicit ableism/fetishisation from other characters, and internalised ableism in Dean’s thoughts. If this is likely to be triggering or upsetting for you, please don’t read this story. If you’d like some more information to make up your mind, please feel free to drop me a line on [LJ](http://anactoria.livejournal.com) or [Tumblr](http://anactorya.tumblr.com).

 

It was the noise that really got to Dean.

Every couple seconds there was the slam of the door or the click of a lock, or the echo of a guard’s footsteps or the sound of a scuffle being broken up around the next corner. Dean hadn’t exactly spent a whole lot of time wondering what life on a secure psych ward would be like, but he guessed he’d at least figured it would be quiet. His own little padded cell, locked up tight against the rest of the world. But nope; this place was gonna _drive_ him nuts.

Funny: Dean had always kinda thought that he could sleep through anything. Well, maybe not _anything_ -anything. A monster at the door or a change in Sam’s breathing would have had him on his feet in a second. But background noise? He’d spent enough of his life crashing in motels just off the interstate—cars passing all night long, TVs blaring, couples fighting and then fucking it out on the other side of paper-thin walls—that anything that didn’t mean an emergency didn’t mean anything at all.

Maybe the bunker had turned him soft, with its long empty corridors and its dozens of rooms where there was no noise they didn’t make themselves. No more jagged corners of other people’s lives poking their way in, distracting Sam from his laptop and making Dean tense up ready to hide the weapons every time a set of footsteps got too close to the door. Not that the silence was always a good thing; but he’d gotten used to it.

(Hell had never been quiet. It had been noisy in a different way than budget motels with life going on everywhere around them, because there was a lot going on down there, but it sure wasn’t life. The only silence had been inside Dean’s head, after he’d picked up the razor, gotten the control back in his hands, and it had felt close enough to bliss that there was no point splitting hairs.)

In here, it was hard to even think straight. Dean kept finding himself starting when a yell or a door slam made itself heard over the general din; turning around to glare at somebody—anybody—with his hands clenched into fists; having to concentrate hard to tamp down the angry throb of the Mark on his arm. How the hell were you supposed to have a conversation in this place, or even just sit down and watch the TV?

Maybe he should ask TJ. The kid didn’t seem to be having any trouble carrying on a conversation—he was pretty much holding up both sides all by himself. Dean just had to nod and say ‘Sure’ once in a while.

“You wanna steer clear of Petey,” TJ was saying, jabbing his forefinger in the direction of a skinny guy sitting alone by one of the windows, his forearms wreathed in tattoos of skulls and roses and God-knew-what kind of other Dungeons and Dragons crap. There was a busty Valkyrie winking from somewhere above his left elbow. She looked a lot happier than Petey. “Look, I know what you’re thinking, guy looks harmless enough—but you gotta remember he ain’t in his right mind.”

Dean held back the smartass comment that would normally have come out of his mouth in favor of a noncommittal grunt. TJ was a nice enough kid, even if he was chattier than Garth, and Dean wasn’t the puppy-kicking type.

Mostly. He hoped.

“Yeah, I know,” TJ went on, like Dean had actually said something back. “Crazy warning a crazy about the crazies. Fucking hilarious, right? But seriously, it’s just good to have somebody new to talk to. Being in here can make you—well.” He gave a snort of laughter and ducked his head. Then he blinked and stifled a yawn. Dean caught it, found himself yawning, too. TJ had said something about how it was a side-effect from the meds for whatever he was in here for, and for all Dean knew, they were both on the same shit.

Honestly, aside from the fact that TJ was way too enthusiastic about talking to Dean, the kid didn’t seem like there was much wrong with him. Sure, you couldn’t always tell---but he didn’t seem like he was exactly practiced at slapping on a smile and playing human either, and Dean would know. You got used to doing that. You learned how to avoid the awkward crap, rein yourself in, make sure the civilians didn’t suspect a thing. (The civilians, or the cops, or the CSA, or the other hunters, or your brother.) But what did Dean know, anyway? Not trusting his judgement anymore was kinda the reason he was here.

Other reasons for being here: protecting the people around him, the ones dumb enough not to run for the hills when it looked like the time bomb was about to blow. All two of them. For once, being almost out of living friends was a good thing. Dean sure as hell shouldn’t be making more of them.

“Yeah, that’s funny kid,” he said to TJ. “Look, no offense, but it’s been kind of a while since I graduated high school.” Not that he actually _did_ graduate high school, but. “How about you go find somebody your own age to buddy up with.”

TJ glanced around the dayroom and raised an eyebrow. “Well, in case you hadn’t noticed, my options here are kinda limited.” He paused, face clouding. “Uh, that didn’t come out like—”

Dean sighed and cut him off. “Look, what I’m saying here is—”

“Smith.” The voice came from behind him. It took Dean a second to react, and TJ nudged him with a foot. He wasn’t on a case here, wasn’t busy playing the part of a Fed or a CDC guy or whatever, and reacting to an alias wasn’t a reflex like it was when he was hunting.

Like it had been, when he was a hunter. He forced himself to think it.

“Smith. Doctor Demetriou wants to see you in her office.”

Demetriou was one of the shrinks, Dean was pretty sure. Well, if she was gonna try to analyze this, better hope she had plenty of time on her hands.

Dean got to his feet. “See you around, TJ.”

The kid shrugged. “Sure,” he said, looking at his feet. For somebody who wasn’t Sam, he had a pretty damn effective kicked-puppy face, and for half a second, Dean actually felt bad.

He swallowed down the guilt as hard as he could. If the kid knew a fraction of the things Dean had done, he’d be running like a bat out of hell, not trying to be his best buddy. Dean was doing him a favor by leaving him well alone.

He turned his back and followed the orderly to the doctor’s office. The door clicked shut behind him.

 

 

\----

 

“That’s interesting.” Doctor Demetriou—a smiling, bright-eyed woman in her thirties, with a mane of dark hair tumbling down over the shoulders of her white coat—nodded at Dean’s forearm. Instinctively, he moved to cover the Mark with his hand.

He stopped the movement short, but not before the doctor had noticed. She cocked an eyebrow and waited, and Dean mentally kicked himself for drawing attention to the damn thing. Bad enough that it throbbed with the beat of his heart, whispered blood and guts and breaking bones in his ear when he was trying to sleep. Worse that he sometimes felt like he was protecting it.

Dean hunched forward in his chair. “No, it ain’t,” he said.

Demetriou shrugged. “Looks pretty interesting to me. And I’m afraid I’m a contrary kind of girl, so now I know you don’t wanna talk about it, I’m _really_ interested.”

Dean looked up at her, met her eyes. Tried to summon up some of the old solid-gold bullshit that used to come naturally as breathing to him when he was dealing with nosy teachers, or the CSA, or pain-in-the-ass FBI agents who thought he was a serial killer. Still did come naturally not so long ago, before Illinois, and the bodies on the floor, and that poor kid in the doorway hiding her face in Cas’s coat.

“’S just a tattoo,” he said. “Hey, if you’re one of those chicks who’s into that, that’s cool, but I ain’t got anything more intimate to show you.” He grinned. “Sorry to disappoint.”

“You’re funny, Dean.” She gave him this little smile and put her head on one side, like a bird. (Or an angel, which was a way more uncomfortable thought. Dean pushed away the memory of how Cas had looked at him before he left, like Dean was still something he could puzzle out and fix.) “Do you find it an effective defense mechanism?”

 _You’re a patronizing bitch, Doctor. Do you find it an effective form of treatment?_ He gritted his teeth and didn’t say it.

“It’s okay. We’ll get there.” Demetriou crossed her legs and scribbled something in his file. Her handwriting was neat and sharp, but Dean still couldn’t read it upside-down.

Maybe he should’ve just opened his trap. He was here to make sure he stayed on lockdown for life, right? The more of a reputation he got for being an asshole, the less chance they’d ever be dumb enough to let him out. Maybe he should just do whatever the hell came to mind. Get to his feet and rip the file out of her hands; put his fist through the window and toss it outta there. Hell, maybe the doc would get off his case if he gave her a big enough scare. Or worse.

The Mark throbbed on his arm, bee-sting angry. Something whispered inside his skull. He couldn’t hear the words, but he got the gist.

There was a guard outside the door, but Dean would know he was coming. The chair was weighted down, so he’d have to use something else to trip the guy up—the doctor’s PC, maybe? He could sweep it off the desk and take the guard’s legs out from under him—

The doctor closed his file and looked up. She had to see how he was feeling—not like Dean was gonna be winning any Oscars on the hiding-your-feelings front since the Illinois shitshow—but it didn’t seem to rattle her. There was this amused glint in her eye, like she thought he was cute.

Throb. _Gouge her fucking eyes out._

The hairs on the back of his neck prickled, and any other time, he would’ve called it instinct. Dad had always told him to listen to his instincts. Only early warning system a hunter had. _Something feels wrong, it probably is wrong._

Problem was, something about everything felt kinda wrong these days. It was getting too hard to separate the little voice of instinct from the little voice of the Mark, so Dean shut his ears to them both as best he could.

Demetriou was an annoying smartass. But she was a shrink, so that went without saying. Last time Dean had gotten analyzed by one of them, she’d been a hallucination, his own brain telling him how screwed he was. And the time before that had been in middle school—some smiling bearded hippie dude who’d pulled Dean out of class and called him _buddy_ and talked to him about movies, and then tried to get him and Sam taken away from Dad.

So he didn’t trust shrinks, sue him. It wasn’t like they’d ever given him a reason to.

“Why don’t you tell me when you got that done?” Demetriou asked, still smiling. “Recent?”

Dean hesitated a moment before looking up and meeting her eyes, plastering on the brightest fake smile in his arsenal. “Yeah, actually,” he said. “And you can spare me the mid-life crisis jokes. Heard ‘em all before, trust me.” Mostly from Crowley, and yeah, that was something he never wanted to think about again.

“I wouldn’t dream of it.” She tapped her pen against the file. “So, if it wasn’t a mid-life crisis, what was it about?”

Dean looked down, the gesture too quick and instinctive to pre-empt. Almost a year ago now, but thinking about it still felt like picking at a raw nerve sometimes. Kevin’s body crumpled on the bunker floor; Gadreel looking at him blankly out of Sam’s eyes; Sam and Cas standing on the bridge as he drove away, neither of them coming to stop him. The fact that it had actually been kind of a relief when Crowley came knocking. And the fact that it was all his own dumb, desperate fault. He raised his eyes again, suddenly wondering if the doctor would be able to read to whole crappy story on his face, but she just lifted a questioning eyebrow, her gaze level, and waited for him to answer.

“Seemed like a good idea at the time,” he offered, eventually.

“At what time?”

He shrugged. “Some shit had just hit the fan. Family stuff. I took off on my own, nobody around to tell me I was gonna regret it in the morning—” Dean spread his hands. “That’s it.” Which it kind of was, he guessed. At least, there was nothing else to the story that the shrink was actually gonna believe. _I wasn’t really on my own, I worked a job with the King of Hell, and he kinda tricked me into taking on a Biblical curse because he wanted me to kill this demon for him. Turned out there were some side-effects he hadn’t mentioned_. Hell, maybe he should come out and say it. Help confirm his diagnosis, whatever it was.

Demetriou put her head on one side. “You’re not used to being alone,” she said. Observation, not a question. “But you don’t have any visitors registered. Why is that, Dean?”

“Yeah, well. They’re better off outta here, and if you’re gonna argue with that, Doc, you’re a liar.”

She held up her hands, mirroring his own gesture from a moment ago. “I’m not here to tell you your decisions are wrong. I’m just here to understand them.”

Fill in the blanks. Yeah, good luck with that, sister. “Well, hey, I dunno what else to tell you.”

Demetriou’s smile was seamless. “Perhaps we’ll leave it there for today.”

“Suits me.” Dean plastered on a grin and gave her a little wave as he left—but as the guard led him back down to the dayroom, he couldn’t help feeling like he’d gotten off a little too easy.

Well. If he was honest—and hey, why not start now?—he felt like that every day he managed to get through without painting the walls bloody. It was habit by now, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Yeah; that was probably all it was. Habit.

 

 

\----

 

Three days since he’d been called into Demetriou’s office—about the only noticeable thing that had happened to Dean since he got here—and he’d already had to dodge TJ maybe a dozen times.

The thing was, the kid didn’t even annoy him that much. If it had just been the voice of the Mark inside his skull, whispering _shut him up, punch him in the mouth, smash his head into the wall_ —well, it wasn’t like he would’ve known how to stop it, but it would’ve been familiar. Better the devil you know, and all that crap.

Problem was, he kinda liked the kid. The enthusiasm, the verbal diarrhea, the occasional flashes of insight that reminded him TJ would probably have gotten into MIT or something, if it wasn’t for whatever had gotten him in here. It was kinda like having Charlie around, or Ash, if Charlie or Ash had been a nineteen-year-old black kid. And that was the problem. Dean wasn’t here to make friends, and he wasn’t here to think about the ones he couldn’t see anymore, either. That was on him, and wishing things had been different wasn’t gonna change them.

Yeah: Dean knew that devil pretty damn well, too, and it wasn’t any better.

So when he saw TJ heading down the corridor toward the dayroom, Dean ducked out of there.

He was lucky; the nearest guard wasn’t looking, distracted for a second by the daytime talk show playing on the TV, and the one on the other side of the room didn’t look like he was about to get off his ass and follow. (Maybe not so lucky, if he thought about it for a second—after all, Dean had gotten himself thrown in here because it was one place that might stand a chance of holding him next time he snapped—but right now he didn’t wanna be dragged back in to face TJ, so he split and didn’t look the gift horse in the mouth.)

He made it halfway down the corridor, and then there were footsteps coming in the other direction. His hiding instinct kicked in, and he tried the handle of the nearest door.

It didn’t open, and one of the downsides of being in here was they didn’t let you have anything that might come in handy for picking a lock.

Without much hope, Dean tried the next door. They normally kept the cleaning cupboards locked up tight; couldn’t risk the crazies getting their hands on cleaning fluid or broom handles or anything else that might be handy for hurting people. Only, this time, the handle gave easily under Dean’s hand. Too easily, like it was already broken.

Still, needs must. Dean ducked into the cupboard and held the door closed in front of him.

Something touched his shoulder.

Just a brush, at first—and then it slumped forward, deadweight (yeah, Dean knew deadweight when he felt it) and the door gave way and Dean was stumbling out into the corridor with a two-hundred-pound corpse on top of him.

The dumb freaking slippers they made you wear in here found no purchase on the floor, and Dean slid down flat on his ass, letting out an involuntary _oof_ that probably would’ve had Sammy laughing at him like a little kid. The dead guy slumped into his lap.

Dean scooted out from under him as best he could, grimacing, and took a look.

The corpse’s face was ashy-pale, and not just dead-guy pale. The kind of pale that made Dean want to lean forward and tip the corpse’s head back on instinct, checking for fang marks. Except that the cause of death was pretty damn obvious. It whatever had ripped the dude’s chest open and torn his insides to ribbons. The front of his shirt—what was left of it—was soaked in blood, dried to a rusty brown, and the guy’s face was contorted in horror, like he’d been frozen mid-scream. The smell of blood clung in Dean’s nostrils, coppery and stale and sweet—but even this unexpected, it didn’t turn his stomach, didn’t make him want to cover his mouth with his sleeve and mutter, “Gross.” It made the Mark throb on his arm, a soft reminder that _you missed the good part_ , and he tried to ignore it. Looked the guy over instead, cataloguing the injuries, trying to figure out who and why.

White guy, broad shoulders, big ginger beard. His name was Donnell or Connell or something, Dean thought. They hadn’t spoken, but he’d gotten the basics during one of TJ’s _Who’s Who_ s of the dayroom. Dean didn’t know what he was in here for. He’d learned pretty quick that you didn’t ask. Maybe he’d had enemies; Dean didn’t know. You didn’t ask that, either.

The ripped-open chest cavity, though—no human dude had done that alone. Werewolf, maybe, only they usually went straight for the heart. This looked more like the handiwork of that freaky-ass hippie vampire cult they’d run into in Hibbing, the ones who tore into their victims like Edward Scissorhands on a killing spree.

Not that an entire monster cult was gonna be hiding out in here. And those assholes had been weird even by vamp standards.

So, Dean had blood on his pants and still no idea what had killed Donnell. Connell. Whatever his name was. He should’ve been able to run through the list of other possibilities like reciting the alphabet, but his brain was slow from the medication and it felt more like sifting through grains of sand. The best he could do was sit on his ass on the floor and stare.

There were voices above him, then.

“Smith! Driscoll!” So that had been the dead guy’s name. “Get off the floor and—oh, crap.”

A guard skidded to a halt a couple feet away and hesitated a second, taking in the scene and the fact that Driscoll wasn’t gonna be getting off the floor anytime soon.

More footsteps came skidding down the corridor. A rough pair of hands grabbed Dean’s shoulders, and then he was being wrestled onto his face on the floor. Pretty unnecessary, he thought, seeing as he’d just had the freaking dead guy fall on top of him. It wasn’t like Dean had been expecting a surprise corpse any more than the rest of them. But then one of the guards muttered, “Fucking hell, Smith, what did you do?” and it clicked.

Dean had blood on his pants. Probably on the rest of him, too. Dean had slapped a ‘Crazy’ label on his own forehead, and what the fuck else were they gonna think?

Hell, maybe it was for the best. If the docs here thought he’d ripped a guy to shreds with his bare hands, they’d be extra careful to make sure he didn’t get out.

Dean gritted his teeth as one of the guards hauled him none-too-gently up onto his knees. It wasn’t like he could really take offence at them thinking he was a murdering asshole. He was a murdering asshole, dangerous as any other monster, so maybe it didn’t matter too much that this particular dead guy wasn’t on him.

That was the last thought he had before a meaty fist caught him across the side of the face and the floor came rushing up to meet him.

 

 

\----

 

And for all that he knew he didn’t have the right, Dean woke up feeling pretty damn offended. Or maybe that was the little dude he could feel dancing a jig in lead boots behind his right eyeball.

Or maybe it was the Mark.

Blearily, he tried to sit up. He couldn’t.

Dean looked down. And, crap. He was strapped to the freaking bed, unable to move more than a couple inches in any direction. He bit down on the momentary surge of panic that always accompanied being tied down (the memory of icy-hot chains digging into his wrists, of waking up with six feet of dirt on top of him and fear stealing the breath from his lungs) and looked around as best he could. Not that the plain white ceiling and its striplights told him much.

“So, you’re back with us.” It was Demetriou, looking down at him with one eyebrow raised. Some part of Dean’s fuzzy brain noticed that she didn’t look shaken. Civilians didn’t normally seem this calm when dead bodies showed up at their workplaces.

But maybe people who worked on secure psych wards didn’t count as normal civilians. Maybe this kind of crap wasn’t anything out of the ordinary here.

Anyway, Dean didn’t get time to dwell on the question, because Demetriou was still talking.

“Now, I’m not jumping to any conclusions here,” she went on, “but I know you’re not stupid. You must know it doesn’t look good. You were in a storage cupboard with a dead body.” Well yeah, that was an understatement. “You had Driscoll’s blood on your clothes.”

“Hey, there wasn’t exactly an ‘occupied’ sign on the door,” Dean shot back, but he had to admit it came out sounding pretty lame.

And, _Maybe you don’t really want to convince her_ , some leftover sensible part of his brain pointed out. _Maybe you should just let ‘em believe you did it. That way they’ll never let you out._

Demetriou patted his shoulder. “If I were you,” she said, “I’d probably try toning down the comedy routine. There’s gonna be an enquiry. You’ll have to answer questions. Try to take them seriously.”

“You sound just like—like somebody I used to know.” Dean paused, then, frowning to himself. Nobody else had spoken since he woke up, and he couldn’t see the door from his position on the hospital bed. Was there even a guard in here? And wasn’t that a little weird, the doc being left alone with him? He swallowed. “So, investigation. Who’s gonna be interrogating me? Where are the cops?”

Demetriou laughed and fiddled with something just outside Dean’s field of vision. “Don’t you worry about that right now,” she said—and, without warning, sank a needle into the crook of his arm.

Her fingers were firm on the skin, just above the edge of the Mark. It hummed as though in response, and Dean felt the hot thrum of its hunger in counterpoint to the cool rush of whatever she’d just injected him with.

“What the hell is that?” he asked.

“Just a little something to keep you calm.” Still smiling, Demetriou pulled out the syringe and taped a square of bandage over the pinprick.

“That ain’t an answer,” Dean said, or tried to say. It came out sounding more like _thaaaansrm_ , and Demetriou ignored him. She set down the syringe and breezed out of the room. The click-clack of her footsteps faded down the corridor, and darkness rose up to swallow Dean again.

 

 

\----

 

The next time he woke, it was to the sound of voices.

“That’s what I said,” one of them announced. “Didn’t find any weapons, and Smith would’ve had way more blood on him if he did it. Coroner’s convinced it was an animal attack. Bear or a cougar or something, like something that size could’ve gotten in here without us noticing. Like we even get wildlife around here.”

“Don’t forget about the raccoons,” a second voice supplied, helpfully. “Got into my trash again on Saturday. You shoulda seen the mess...”

Dean blinked a couple times, tuning the voice out. His head felt stuffed full of cotton candy, the Mark throbbed, and the world lurched alarmingly when he glanced in the direction of the voices. Not that they’d given him anything new to check against his internal database of supernatural fuglies. ‘Animal attack’ was the go-to explanation every time the local PD didn’t know what to make of a dead body, so that was no damn help. Driscoll had been ripped to shreds, so no way was this a wraith—which, thank fuck for that, because Dean had no desire to revisit the last time he’d been locked up in a place like this—or a normal vampire. (And man, was it screwed up that Dean’s internal database even had a ‘normal vampire’ entry.)

Not a werewolf: those went straight for the heart. A ghoul? Probably not: they liked to kill their victims slow, and Driscoll hadn’t been missing that long. Dean had seen him at supper, shoveling down grayish meatloaf along with everybody else.

A hand landed on Dean’s shoulder, then. An orderly’s face loomed into his field of vision, and it looked like Dean wasn’t gonna get time to run down the rest of his mental list of ‘Supernatural Assholes: Likes to Disembowel People for Fun’ edition.

“Rise and shine,” said the orderly, looking way more cheerful than anybody had the right to at the moment. “Looks like you’re in the clear for now. Cops are still gonna want to talk to you about how you found Driscoll, though.”

Dean swallowed dryly, and got out a, “Sure, I won’t leave town.”

The orderly rolled his eyes and got to work unbuckling the straps. Dean’s head swam, and he screwed his eyes shut and opened them again. Didn’t help much, just made dark spots dance before his eyes. Didn’t help him come up with any better ideas, either.

He might’ve been ‘in the clear,’ but he still got a watchful escort back to the dayroom. Not that that was a bad thing. Dean kept finding himself picturing Driscoll’s dead eyes in the storage closet, pulling up images of blood and guts and no freaking glory from the way-too-well-stocked gallery in his head—and each one got a twinge of interest from the Mark, a hot little spark at the base of his skull. Being watched kept him from giving in to it too bad, from dwelling on the images, from reaching across to run his thumb over the raised edge of the Mark as often as he wanted.

Then they were at the door of the dayroom, and TJ came running toward him—or, okay, walking as fast as he could get away with without getting his ass sent back to his room—and Dean had a whole new set of problems for his fuzzy brain to worry about.

He was gonna have to do something about this. There were too many people in here to let some supernatural asshole run around draining the life out of them.

Okay, some of them probably deserved it. Hell, most of them probably deserved it. But then there were guys like TJ. So the kid heard voices. He probably had a tinfoil hat stashed in his room to stop the government scanning his brain or stealing his teeth. Hell, he must’ve done _something_ to get slammed in this place. He’d still been kind to Dean. Carried on trying to be his friend, however many times Dean had told him to screw off. He was still a good kid. Couldn’t be the only one in here.

Maybe Dean should call home. Get Sam to put somebody on it.

Only that seemed like kind of a cop-out. Whatever fire the Mark pumped into his veins, whatever poison it whispered into his dreams, Dean still knew what he was doing most of the time. Hadn’t lost himself yet. Hell, the Mark even gave him a little extra juice when it came to fighting monsters.

Of course, giving it a fight to feed on might make it stronger, might send Dean a little further down the slippery slope toward complete fucking psychosis—but that would just be hurrying up the inevitable. He was already lost; he knew that. Putting anybody else in danger so he could hang onto his stay of execution a couple weeks longer—yeah, that would be the real dick move.

Plus, calling Sam would involve… well, calling Sam. The chances he’d listen to Dean and send somebody else to deal with the problem instead of showing up himself were zilch to none. No: Dean was gonna have to see this one through himself.

“Dude, you’re back!” TJ stopped short of pulling him into a hug (not that that would’ve been allowed anyway), but Dean could see that he wanted to. He could see it in how the kid’s grin dimpled his face up just like Sam’s; in the relief in his eyes. He’d been sitting alone before Dean came back in. “I thought we were never gonna see you again, for sure.”

Dean forced a grin. “Yeah, well,” he said. “Like a bad penny.”

 

 

\----

 

The thing about being stuck in this place was, it was pretty much designed to be impossible to snoop around in. The inmates—sorry, _patients,_ , not that Dean could always tell the difference—going anywhere without a pair of watchful eyes was not supposed to happen. And Dean appreciated that; he really did. The day the Mark finally took hold for good, he was gonna need that 24/7 surveillance.

It was just that it made finding out what the monster was… also pretty much impossible.

On a normal job, Dean would’ve gotten a look at the body—but he couldn’t exactly disappear and show back up with a fake CDC ID, and sneaking out of the dayroom unobserved was hard enough. No way he was getting into the morgue. Chatting to the cops, also out. Demetriou hadn’t accused him of anything since he’d woken up strapped to that gurney, but when he’d tried asking her what had happened to Driscoll in their last session (his best winning smile, and _c’mon, Doc, I found the guy, I need closure_ ), she’d just smiled and asked him how it had made him feel.

(He’d been about to lie, the old reflex kicking in, just like rolling out the way of a punch when you get knocked to the ground. Then he’d remembered that there wasn’t any point anymore, so he’d just shrugged and said, “Not much. Kinda wanted to hit something.” Demetriou had written something down on her clipboard and kept smiling.)

So, Dean did what he could. He asked around. He listened.

It wasn’t like he’d been here long enough to get to know Driscoll, but a couple of the other guys had. Apparently he’d ended up in here because of something involving a kid. Never shared any other details, but it sounded like he’d felt guilty as hell over it. Part of Dean didn’t wanna know any more than that.

(Another, smaller part of him taunted, _Why don’t you want to know? Afraid you might not feel as disgusted as you should at the thought of small bones and blood spattered across the floor?_ )

Driscoll had kept to himself, mostly. Decent card-player, liked to watch game shows, not a big reader. Claimed to have once met Michael Jackson’s chimp, only nobody was sure whether that was a symptom, or a shaggy dog story, or maybe even true.

But aside from that, nothing to indicate why some currently-unidentified supernatural nasty might’ve wanted to eviscerate him and dump him in a cupboard. No enemies to speak of—though Dean guessed if anybody had found out what had happened with the kid, that might’ve driven them to off him. (A twinge of approval from the Mark, hot and good like the first cup of joe of the morning.) A monster playing Batman. Or Rorschach, anyway. Well, Dean guessed he’d heard weirder.

“Dude.” TJ plopped down into the chair opposite him, and Dean gave him an absentminded nod. He’d pretty much given up on trying to make the kid go away; he just nodded and smiled and hoped that TJ got bored sooner rather than later. Sometimes he didn’t even bother trying to bore the kid into giving up. After all, he’d been here longer than Dean. If anything out of the ordinary was going on here, he might notice it before Dean did.

Right now, though, TJ seemed distracted, tapping his fingers on the tabletop, glancing from Dean to the TV to the face of the guard nearest the door, then back again.

Dean heaved a sigh. He _really_ wasn’t supposed to be making friends here.

Still.

“You ok?” he asked.

“Huh?” TJ blinked rapidly and wet his lips, glancing around like he was looking for something for a moment before he turned back to Dean and grinned. “Yeah, man. Yeah, I’m good. Hey, did you see that old lady on the TV making deep-fried pie? Freaking donut burgers, man.” He shook his head. “White people.” Then he paused. “No offense.”

“Uh… none taken?” Dean peered at him.

Change the subject, plaster on a smile and talk about something dumb. Yeah, Dean knew that avoidance strategy. He was still in rehab for it. Something was on the kid’s mind.

Plus the distracted way TJ looked around, like he was expecting to be attacked by something that wasn’t there—it kinda reminded him of how Sam had been after he got his soul back, when he kept thinking Lucifer was following him around. Of course, as far as he knew TJ had never roomed with Satan, but this sure as hell wasn’t normal. Not for him, anyway.

Dean leaned forward, lowering his voice to keep the orderlies from overhearing. “Dude, are you sure? You’re kinda acting like you just sat on a wasps’ nest here.”

TJ blinked again, but this time, his eyes finally focused in on Dean’s face. “I’m good,” he said, and nodded to himself, as though confirming something. “I’m good.”

“Sure you are.” Dean used the same voice he did when he knew Sam was sitting on something, not really expecting it to work, because when did it ever? But TJ cast a wary glance at the nearest orderly, then leaned in toward him.

“You hear that?” he said.

Dean frowned. “Hear what?”

“That guy. Talking right up in my ear.” TJ squinted. “Kinda sounds like he’s from Brooklyn, but man, I don’t even know anybody from New York.” He looked so damn affronted about it that it took Dean a second to put two and two together.

“Nope,” he said, at last. “I don’t hear him. So…”

TJ scrubbed a hand down his face, looking defeated. “So those new meds they got me on ain’t working.”

New meds. Come to think of it, TJ hadn’t been yawning all the time, the last couple days—and he’d said something about the sleepiness being a side-effect. It made as much sense as anything. Dean wondered for a moment about the stuff they’d gotten him on when he showed up here. It didn’t seem to have had much effect, so far, but then Dean was the only person in here with a goddamned (literally) primordial curse instead of a mental illness.

Well, there was him and whoever had sucked the life out of Driscoll. Whatever was up with them might not be Mark of Cain-bad, but it was sure as hell supernatural.

TJ, though—TJ was just a kid in a bad way.

“That what landed you in this place?” Dean asked him. “Hearing voices?”

TJ nodded, but his expression was kinda dubious. “Yeah, I guess,” he said. “I—” He broke off.

Dean groaned internally. TJ didn’t look pissed, so Dean figured he’d managed to keep his frustration off of his face—but then, TJ seemed like the kind of guy who would’ve shrugged and said something about karma if you slugged him in the face and ran off with his credit card. “You what?” Dean asked him, as gently as he could manage.

“I see things.” TJ looked down. “Or, I saw something, anyway, this one time. That was when—” He paused, raising his hand like he wasn’t aware he was doing it, pausing with his fingertips an inch from his left eye. Something curled uncomfortably in Dean’s stomach.

“What happened, man?” he asked. “I ain’t gonna—well. I might still think you’re crazy. But that doesn’t mean I won’t believe you.”

TJ blinked in surprise, looking up at Dean. He didn’t say anything for a couple seconds, but then the look on his face turned into something determined. “I got a sister,” he said. “Jayna. She’s five years older’n me, and she married this guy, Shaun. I didn’t like him. Always thought he was smarter than the rest of us. But he never would’ve hurt her.” He paused, and Dean bit back another question and just nodded. “Only then, one day, she called me and she was freaking out. Said she’d shut herself up in the bathroom, and Shaun was acting all weird. So I ran over there, and—” Another pause. “It was creepy. First of all, Jayna swore she saw it too, before I showed up there. But then later she changed her mind. Said she was just freaked out because of how he was acting.” TJ looked mystified, expression unfocused. “But it was his eyes, man. They looked—”

“Black?” Dean suggested. “Or red?”

TJ’s eyes widened in shock, and he nodded. “Black,” he said, so quiet it was just a breath. A moment later, he picked up the story again: “I grabbed the nearest thing—Shaun used to keep a length of rebar by the door, just in case somebody broke in. I hit him with it. I just wanted to get him away from the bathroom door, to make sure he wouldn’t hurt my sister. But he fell down, and it was like this black smoke came pouring out of him. Jayna looked out the bathroom door, and I coulda sworn she saw it too. I coulda _sworn_ she did.”

Dean’s heart sank.

Civilians did that all the time. Told themselves that they couldn’t trust their own eyes, because what they’d seen was crazy, and if they believed it, that might make them crazy, too. Rational explanations were a hell of a lot easier than dealing with the supernatural shitshow that was Dean’s _another freaking Tuesday_. You couldn’t exactly blame TJ’s sister for changing her story. She probably didn’t believe she’d really seen it herself. Only, it meant that TJ wasn’t in this place because he heard things that weren’t real. He was here because he’d been unlucky enough to run into a demon, and there hadn’t been a hunter around to take care of it for him.

TJ had gone quiet, eyes on the floor. _He thinks you don’t believe him, either_ , Dean’s brain supplied. _So what are you gonna tell him? ‘It’s your lucky day, dude, monsters really are out there waiting to eat you for lunch’?_

He sighed, and reached across to pat the TJ’s shoulder. That got him a sharp look from the nearest guard, but the guy relaxed once he noticed Dean wasn’t about to throw a punch.

“It ain’t your fault,” he said. “What made you do what you did—it wasn’t you.” It was about all he could come up with, short of spilling the beans or outright lying.

It still felt like a lie, and the Mark throbbed on his arm. _Still telling yourself that?_ it whispered, somewhere in the back of his skull. _Still pretending I’m not a part of you?_

Dean told it to shut up. This wasn’t about the Mark, wasn’t about him.

He turned back to TJ. “You ever see anything like that again?” he asked. “Like, in here, maybe?”

TJ blinked, then shook his head. “Nah. Just that one time.” He scowled. “Only if they don’t fix my meds…”

“Dude, you’ll be fine,” Dean said. TJ didn’t really look reassured, but then Dean hadn’t really expected him to. “Or, I mean—you seen anything else weird?”

TJ looked up at him again. “This is about Driscoll, right? You’re trying to figure out who killed him.”

Dean shrugged. He couldn’t exactly deny it. “Can’t blame a guy for being curious,” he pointed out. “Hell, they almost pinned it on me.”

“Sure, sure.” TJ nodded. “But, you know weird doesn’t always mean crazy, right?”

“I get it.” And crazy doesn’t always mean weird, because when you know something’s gone wrong inside of you, you work like a dog to keep it down. You plaster on a smile and crack a joke and pour a drink, and you method-act normal until you can’t remember what it felt like not to fake. “But, you know what I mean, right? I mean, not… symptoms. I mean people acting different than themselves. Or, I dunno, anyone who _looks_ kinda strange. Locks himself in his room when there’s a full moon. Anything, man.”

TJ paused a second. Then his eyes darted across the room.

“Huh,” he said. “Think I already told you about Petey. Ain’t come out of his room in a week, an’ he only ever shows his face after dark. That the kind of weird you’re looking for?”

Even across the room, it was obvious there was something fucked up about the guy. Maybe it was the sickly pallor, or the bloodshot eyes that stared a little too hollowly ahead of him. Or maybe it was the freaking Dracula (seriously?) tattooed on the guy’s right forearm. Dean hadn’t noticed that one last time TJ pointed him out.

Dean held in a sigh—just—and tried to imagine what the hell any vampire worth its fangs would be doing advertising itself like that. Then again, there had been that freaky-ass fanboy shapeshifter who thought he was Bela Lugosi, back after Dean got out of Hell. Maybe the grass is always greener on the other side, even for monsters.

So maybe this guy wasn’t a vamp. Maybe he was something else. It was the only lead Dean had, and hell, it was a start.

He watched Petey circle the dayroom until he found an empty seat, and then kept watching him, laying his palm over the hot pulse of the Mark.

 

 

\----

 

Problem was, the guy almost never coming out of his room when it was daylight outside made him kind of hard to snoop on. Dean ended up taking a seat near the dayroom door every day, keeping one eye on the corridor for when Petey emerged from his room to take a piss. Back to the wall, eyes out for the monster. So maybe he wasn’t a hunter anymore, but it was gonna take more than announcing, ‘I’m retired’ to switch off the instincts.

And, sure enough, Petey emerged around two in the afternoon, looking around like he was trying to broadcast, ‘Hey, I’m the sketchiest asshole that ever sketched’ before he made his run for the men’s room.

Dean glanced around, checking the positions of the guards. One of them distracted by whatever was on the TV, the other eyeing a dude whose name Dean didn’t know, only he’d been huddled in the corner looking increasingly twitchy since mid-morning.

Awesome. Dean ducked out of the dayroom and down the corridor.

Inside Petey’s room, the curtains were drawn. There wasn’t much around the place in the way of personal possessions—just some notepaper piled up on the nightstand, plus a photograph of Petey, presumably before he did whatever got him shoved in here, gothed up to the eyebrows with some Morticia-looking chick next to him. They were smiling, standing outdoors in broad daylight, no sunglasses. Didn’t exactly look dangerous. Anyway, experience had taught Dean that people who dressed like they were ready for a hard night sacrificing babies at the altar of Satan were usually the first to run like hell from a real demon. He set down the picture and squinted at the sheets of paper on the nightstand, covered all over with cramped, blocky handwriting. In crayon, so apparently the powers that be had decided against letting Petey have anything pointy. Not that that meant a whole lot in this place, but Dean chalked up a mark in the ‘suspect’ column anyway.

In the gloom, it was kind of hard to read Peter’s handwriting. Dean frowned and held one of the sheets up to his face.

It mostly read, _I’m sorry_.

“Dean.”

Demetriou’s voice made him start, made a jolt of adrenaline run down his spine, and the Mark throb in concert with it. He was sure he’d closed the door when he let himself in here. But she was standing there, head on one side, looking at him with this mixture of reprove and amusement. Like she’d caught a puppy with its nose in the cookie jar, only it was too cute to be really mad at.

Dean bristled under the look and turned to face her, his hands balled into fists. “Yeah?”

“Now, I could tell you you’re not supposed to be in here, but I’m pretty sure you know that already.”

Dean gritted his teeth and nodded. Demetriou stepped aside.

“So why don’t you come into my office, and we can have a little chat?” She said it like she was extending an invitation, which was a bucket of laughs, but Dean plastered on a grin.

“Sure, Doc. Is there gonna be tea and cake?”

She laughed. “How did you know about my secret stash?” Her eyes were steely, though, and she waited for Dean to leave the room before closing the door firmly behind him.

They were halfway into the office when a ringtone cut through the air. Demetriou paused and felt around in the pocket of her white coat, waving a hand toward the inside of the room at the same time.

“Have a seat,” she told Dean, finally retrieving her cellphone. “I have to take this. I’ll be with you in a moment.”

Dean shrugged, and figured hey, he wouldn’t deserve to call himself a hunter if he didn’t take advantage of the opportunity. He pushed the office door shut behind him and went for the filing cabinet.

One of the drawers was half-open, and he peered inside, his heart speeding up and the hot pulse of the Mark intensifying when he saw what was inside. The tabs along the top had the names of patients on them. Casefiles.

Involuntarily, his eyes flicked to the ‘S’s. There were a couple Smiths in there, and one of the files had to be his. (Why had he picked that name, the one from Zachariah’s screwed-up Pleasantville office world? Because it wasn’t him, and some part of his dumb brain was still stuck pretending that this wasn’t him?) His hand hovered over the files for a half a second, before he told himself to grow the fuck up and shut the impulse down. Dean didn’t need a medical opinion to tell him he was screwed.

Instead, he pulled out the file with Petey’s name.

There were photographs inside. Bloody ones, more like something off the crime board on a procedural cop show than a neat, pastel-painted shrink’s office.

Petey had some serious shit to be sorry for. But Dean looked at the photographs with their dark slicks of blood, and inside his head, the Mark whispered, _Aren’t you jealous?_

“Screw you,” he muttered to it, which probably made him sound like a grade-A nutbag, but then that was why he was here, right?

The people Petey had killed were both chicks, skinnier than him and gothed up to the eyeballs. (Neither of them was the girl from the picture in his room, though, and some part of Dean felt weirdly, stupidly relieved at that.) They wouldn’t have stood a chance fighting back, the way a big dude like Driscoll might’ve. Kinda weird, because Sammy had made him watch enough true crime documentaries that Dean knew killers—the human kind, anyway—had a type, an MO. They didn’t just decide to change things up without a reason.

Maybe he was overthinking this crap. The Mark didn’t care, after all. The blood, the kill, the crack of bone under his hands. Those were the important part. The body they happened to was mostly an afterthought. Dean had had to admit that in the end, after _I only kill monsters_ stopped being true and _I only kill people who have it coming_ started to sound less and less convincing.

He started at the sound of footsteps in the corridor, stuffed the photographs back in the file and the file back in the drawer and sat his ass back in the chair as fast as he could. The door opened and Demetriou breezed in, slipping her cellphone back into the pocket of her lab coat. She smelled nice, Dean noticed as she passed him and slid into her chair. Kinda fruity.

Dean snorted. Sniffing people—that was something Cas would do, not him. Maybe he really was losing it in here.

(He forced himself not to picture Cas, the night he left. How damn human he’d looked, dozing in one of the library chairs. How selfishly grateful Dean had been that he wasn’t awake to try and stop him walking out the door.)

Demetriou shot him a look. “Something funny, Dean?”

Reflexively, he grinned back at her before he said, “No, it really ain’t.”

“But it’s bothering you, isn’t it?” She tilted her head, and dark shiny curls tumbled forward over her shoulder. “What happened to Driscoll?”

Dean shrugged. “Some dude gets whacked and I get the blame for it? No offense, but what did they teach you in shrink school? Pretty sure not being bothered about it would make me crazier.”

Demetriou nodded. “But most people wouldn’t obsess, either. Why were you snooping around Petey’s room? Because you suspect him?”

“Pretty sure wanting to know who the killer I’m locked in with ain’t so crazy either.”

“You’re locked in with more than one killer, Dean.” Demetriou leaned forward across her desk, her fixed on his, her expression all _you-can-talk-to-me_ sympathy. “I think you want Peter to be responsible so you can stop worrying about whether the staff were right to suspect you. You want him to be the violent one, so you don’t have to be.”

This time, Dean did laugh, even if he felt more like choking. “Trust me, Doc, I know that ship’s sailed.”

“Do you?” Demetriou held his gaze for a moment, but before Dean could scrape up a _what the fuck is that supposed to mean?_ , she pursed her lips and said, “Let’s talk about something else for a moment.”

“Sure thing.” Dean lifted an eyebrow. “What do you wanna talk about? Brangelina? How are the Nicks doing? Got any opinions on Obamacare?”

Demetriou sighed and pushed her hair out of her face. “Actually, I’d rather talk about deflection.”

“Well, Doc, I don’t think you got anything to worry about in the mirror department.” Dean gave her a wink, then thought maybe it had come off a little more exaggerated than he was aiming for.

She just nodded, though. “Yes, that’s exactly what I want to talk about.” She paused, looking at him thoughtfully over her steepled fingertips. Her nails were painted, dark red polish the color of plums. “You were admitted here voluntarily, Dean. If I remember correctly, you said that you needed help.”

Dean shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Had he said that? The actual admission process was kind of a blur, if he was honest, details lost in the wash of relief that had come with getting there before Sammy and Cas could catch up with him. He shrugged at the doc, the smile stiffening like plaster on his face. “Whatever you say.”

“And yet you’ve made no effort to engage during our sessions,” Demetriou pointed out. “Some of the men in here will never return to normal lives. Some of them would have nowhere to go if they could. But you, Dean—you have a family. They keep calling us.”

“They do, huh.” The words came out without Dean’s permission, and he looked down, wishing he could swallow them back. His throat felt dry.

She nodded. “They’re concerned for you. They want you to go home, or at least to see them. But you don’t seem interested. It’s as though you want to avoid the world.”

“Well, like I said, Doc, no offense. But maybe you don’t got me figured out as well as you thought. Because if you had a goddamn clue about me, you wouldn’t want me anywhere near the rest of the world, either. Hell, you’d probably throw in bonus handcuffs and a padded cell.”

“So perhaps you’ve given up. You don’t think you can save yourself.”

Dean shrugged. “What can I say? I’m a realist.”

Demetriou smiled a little, but her eyes were only half on Dean, like she was puzzling something out in her head. Which wasn’t how shrinks were supposed to act, Dean was pretty sure, but then what the hell did he know?

“So, you’re here because you think you’re dangerous, but you won’t help me deal with your issues.” She glanced down at the file on the desk—which, Dean realized, was his own. He hadn’t noticed that before, too focused on rooting through the file drawers.

“Well hey, don’t let me tell you how to do your job.”

“I don’t plan on it.” Demetriou smiled at him. “Do you want to know what I think?”

“I’m sure you’re gonna tell me.”

“You mean to say you’re not even a little curious?” She leaned toward him over the casefile, an amused quirk to her mouth.

Dean spread his hands. “Okay, fine. Shrink me.”

“Maybe you feel like the problem isn’t really yours at all. You don’t think talking to me will help, because helping you won’t help.” She paused. “You don’t think the problem is you at all.”

“Oh, believe me, I know I got problems.”

“That isn’t quite the same thing, though, is it?” Demetriou held his gaze. “And then there’s the fact you didn’t seek help until now, even with your history of violence. I think something happened. Something you’re blaming for your actions.” For a second, she brushed the crook of her arm with the tips of her fingers—just where the Mark sat, on Dean.

Maybe he’d been worrying at it again. He’d found himself touching it without thinking often enough, lately, that he’d kind of given up on trying not to. She must have noticed.

Not like she could’ve known what it was, though, right? Dean had never even heard a monster mention it before Cain.

She was wrong, anyway. That was one of the few upsides to being in the nuthouse. Once in a while, when he felt like being honest with himself, Dean could stop pretending every asshole impulse he had was the Mark. He didn’t have to nod and say, _Yeah, it’s getting worse_ when he lashed out, when he knew it had been there inside of him all along. The Mark just loosened the faucet a little. It stripped away the things that made Dean hold himself back. The guilt; the knowing how crappy he’d feel in the morning; the impulse to take care of things that were smaller and softer than he was. All the stuff that made saving people as important as hunting things. Without that stuff, this was what was left of him. Blood and anger and saying whatever shitty thing popped into his head just to watch somebody wince.

Dean knew it. Sam and Cas were stubborn assholes and they kept telling him, telling themselves, that it wasn’t true, that he was _good_ somewhere deep down. Here, he didn’t have to worry about disappointing them anymore.

“Hate to interrupt your Sherlock moment,” he told the doctor, “but we already know what happened. I killed five dudes. And yeah, they were assholes, but I didn’t kill ‘em because they were assholes. That was just the excuse. Maybe I woulda done it anyway.” He held out his hands. “I’m owning it.”

“Are you?”

Dean rolled his eyes. “Ain’t you supposed to tell me that? Or is this some Buddhist _nothing is real_ crap?”

The doctor smiled. “Not really my style.” She glanced at her watch. “But I’m afraid we’ll have to finish there for now.” She scribbled something down in his file. “I’m going to make some recommendations—and I’ll see you again tomorrow, Dean.”

Maybe he was imagining it, but it sounded kind of like a threat.

 

 

\----

 

The line for meds shuffled along slowly. A loud dude with a cloud of graying hair, whose name Dean hadn’t learned yet, was arguing with the nurse.

“I’m telling you,” he insisted. “This is the wrong stuff.”

The nurse rolled his eyes. “Yeah, Greely, I’m sure you know better than the doctors.” He held out the little paper cup, and eventually Greely took it, grumbling half-audibly to himself and swallowing back the contents.

TJ had already gotten his dose, and he was sitting in the dayroom, just visible if Dean looked back over his shoulder, drumming his fingers antsily on the tabletop. Sometimes he glanced back over his shoulder, like he was reassuring himself there was nobody there.

Yeah, he definitely wasn’t doing so good.

Dean didn’t get much time to think about it, though, because then he was at the front of the line, being handed his own paper cup with a couple pills inside.

He’d been taking the meds. He’d figured, where was the harm? Maybe—probably—they wouldn’t do anything to stop the Mark eating away at his defenses, whispering in his ears. But if they slowed him down enough that he couldn’t act on its instructions—or the impulses it dug up from inside his head, whatever—then Dean figured that was a win.

These pills were different than usual, though. Dean squinted down at them. He’d gone through the bathroom cabinets of enough dead people’s houses to know his meds, and these were Prozac capsules, green and white. They didn’t look anything like the little round white tabs Dean had been taking up until now—Sero-something, he thought. He frowned and held the cup up to the nurse.

“What the hell are these?”

The nurse frowned over the top of his clipboard. “They’re your medication. You need to take them.”

Dean shook his head. “These ain’t mine. Check again.”

The nurse gave him a look that could’ve stripped paint, but he checked his clipboard. “It’s right here,” he said, looking back at Dean with the tiniest hint of a smirk. “Doctor’s orders.” A pathetic little dude taking satisfaction in whatever little scrap of power he could find to lord over the poor assholes stuck in this place. Kinda reminded him of Metatron.

The Mark throbbed, and Dean bit the inside of his lip to distract himself from the mental image of smashing the guy’s nose in through his face, slamming him to the ground and punching him again and again until his face was a splintery mess of blood and bone.

Instead, he plastered on a grin and echoed, “Doctor’s orders, huh?” He raised the cup, swirling it like it was a glass of Crowley’s fancy-ass Scotch. The pills rattled.

The nurse crossed his arms. “If you’re not going to take your medication—”

“Relax.” Dean lifted the cup in a mock-toast. “Down the hatch.”

The pills burned as he dry-swallowed them, and the nurse tutted as an orderly passed Dean his regulation paper cup of water. Screwing with assholes wasn’t exactly gonna slake the Mark the way a full-on fight with a nest of supernatural nasties would—but still, it was kinda satisfying.

He walked away from the nurses’ station—not too fast; that tended to freak them out in the way that got you strapped to a gurney and Dean didn’t wanna think too hard about what might happen if they tried that on him—and slumped down into the seat beside TJ.

TJ turned to look at him, a quick, nervy little jerk of his head that made Dean think of a puppet on a string. He hadn’t moved like that when Dean first got here, Dean was sure. He’d been talkative, but kinda sleepy, always complaining about how the old meds made him want to doze off in the middle of the afternoon like somebody’s grandpa. Maybe it was because the new meds weren’t fixing what was wrong with him. Or maybe it was something else.

“They change your meds up, too?” TJ asked.

Dean was about to reply, but before he could get the words out, TJ had reached across and slapped a hand over his mouth.

“Wait,” he hissed. “Keep your voice down.”

Dean fought back the instinctive spike of adrenaline; made himself listen to the sensible voice in his head that said, _TJ’s a good kid, you don’t wanna hurt him_ , and not the one that said, _But wouldn’t it be easy to grab his wrist and twist his arm back, to snap it like a twig and watch him scream?_ He nodded, and TJ carefully removed his hand. His eyes were fixed on something over Dean’s shoulder, and a second later, the click of high-heeled footsteps passed them. Dean glanced behind him, and managed to avoid catching Demetriou’s eye as she passed.

“Yeah,” he said, low-voiced, once the Doc had vanished in the direction of her office. “These capsule things.”

“Me too.”

“That Greely dude said his meds were wrong, too.” Dean frowned. “You think they’re putting everybody on the same stuff?”

TJ nodded. “And,” he said, “they’re lying about what it is.”

Dean raised an eyebrow. “How do you figure?” He hadn’t thought of that. After all, it wasn’t like the guys in here could sit down and say, _Doc, I don’t think this is working for me, can we try another course of meds?_ or just refuse to take the stuff. Why would anyone bother lying to them?

“It looks like a Prozac cap, right?” TJ whispered, leaning in toward him. Dean nodded, and felt kinda weirded-out that for once, he wasn’t the only person in the room who could identify psych meds by looking at them.

“But I’ve been on that stuff before,” TJ went on. “A few years back, before they figured out what was wrong with me.” He glanced down. “I didn’t tell anybody about the voices, at first. My parents would’ve freaked. So they gave me Prozac. Didn’t help, but it didn’t feel nothing like this.” He frowned. “I think they’ve been screwing around with the meds. Making it look like something normal, but it ain’t.” He glanced around the room again, waiting for the nearest orderly to look away before he mouthed, “You think they’re experimenting on us? I mean, who’s gonna miss us if it goes wrong, right?” He looked cautiously at Dean’s face, like he was waiting on Dean’s reaction to tell him if he sounded nuts or not.

It sounded like exactly the kind of crazy conspiracy theory you’d expect to hear in this place. Like something off those paranormal websites Sam spent way too much time on, scouring for the 1% of not-bullshit.

Except that TJ had a point there, that last part. Some big government conspiracy? Probably not. But monsters using humans as their lab rats wasn’t exactly new. Dean grimaced, remembering Pestilence; the Leviathan; even that creepy Doc Benton, who’d barely been human by the end.

And if you want to screw with human brains? Yeah, you picked somewhere like this. Somewhere everybody had already had a _Mad, Bad and Dangerous_ label slapped on them, so when they started ripping each other to shreds nobody would bat an eye.

TJ was right on that. As for the rest of it… well, Dean was gonna find out if he could.

He met TJ’s eyes. “I dunno, man,” he said, honestly. “Just—don’t say anything to anybody else, okay? Can’t be too careful.” Which, okay, probably wasn’t the best thing to say to a schizophrenic who was off his meds, but if the monster figured out TJ suspected something before Dean figured out who the monster was—well, yeah. Dean didn’t even wanna think about that.

He kept a low profile, the rest of the day. Head down, eyes front. But he got his first clue before he got the chance to do any sneaking around.

The meds definitely weren’t right.

It started like a cold itch beneath his skin: an amped-up, shivery feeling that made him struggle to sit still. Plus a touch of nausea—not enough that he actually thought he was about to puke, but enough to be uncomfortable. He barely touched his dinner, and that was enough to get him a weird look from one of the orderlies.

“Something wrong?” the guy asked, in a tone that implied, _There better not be, so shut up and eat your slop_. The Mark gave a gentle twinge, and Dean thought, what the hell. If somebody here was gonna stand out as a troublemaker and end up on the monster’s shitlist, better that it was him.

He looked the orderly in the eye. “Yeah, actually.”

The guy raised an unimpressed eyebrow.

“They got me on these new meds this morning,” Dean told him. “I think something’s screwy.”

The eyebrow again. These guys probably got told not to say, _No shit, everyone’s screwy in here_ , but aggressive eyebrow-raising? Couldn’t really have a policy against that, Dean guessed.

The Mark throbbed on his arm, and the urge to lash out rose inside of him like wind through a tunnel, howling that he couldn’t let the asshole get away with this, he needed to break something, to get blood on his hands. It made him feel sicker, but at least it hadn’t gotten to the stage where he couldn’t control it yet. He forced himself not to listen.

“Can you at least check it out?” he said, hating the wheedling note in his voice. “Ask the nurse to take another look?”

The orderly snorted, but said, “Fine. I’ll get somebody to check.” He didn’t move from his position, though.

 _Told you_ , whispered the Mark. Dean told it to shut up. (Not out loud; that wasn’t gonna do him any favors. If he got himself stuck in a padded cell or some shit, he was never gonna figure out what was going on here.) He put his head down and went back to pushing shapeless chunks of some unidentifiable meatstuff around his plate.

If Dean had his way, if he was still allowed near knives or hotplates, he’d march the whole useless kitchen staff out the back door and take over. Hell, they wouldn’t even have to pay him. Getting to eat a meal that actually tasted of something would be enough.

For a moment, he pictured himself back in the kitchen in the bunker—the countertops clean and shiny, the easy rhythm of cooking, the kind-of-amazed way Sam still looked at him when he pulled out the stops and made something awesome. The ache of missing it hit him in the gut, hard enough it made his hand shake and he dropped his fork.

The orderly shot him a look that could’ve soured milk. He picked it back up and shoved a piece of possibly-potato into his mouth. It tasted like nothing.

 

 

\----

 

That feeling stuck with Dean the rest of the day. Nauseous and kinda disconnected, like either his brain was going a little too fast or the world was, and the throb of the Mark wouldn’t let up. He found his head turning at snippets of argument overheard across the dayroom, at the sound of a door opening or the scrape of a chair on the floor. He even snapped at TJ when the kid didn’t take his one-syllable answers as a hint and kept on talking, making him duck his head and retreat across the room with this wounded look in his eyes that kinda reminded him of Sam.

(He’d been fourteen, old enough to start noticing girls, and Sallie Wharton with the shiny lipgloss and the spaghetti-strap tops that hardly covered anything had hung around after school to talk to him, curling a strand of her dark hair around her finger. Dean had been good at the don’t-care act even then, but his palms had been sweating. When Sammy had run up, clutching some science project about fish or something, waving it under his nose, Dean’s nerves had gotten to him and he’d snapped something about how nobody wanted to look at that stupid kid stuff. Sam had slunk off to the school bus with that same wounded look in his eyes, and Sallie had laughed, and Dean had decided that maybe he didn’t like her so much after all.)

Yeah, that look. It made guilt spike in his chest, and for a moment he didn’t know whether to shut it down or hang onto it, because at least he knew it was a feeling of his own. The meds, the Mark—he didn’t know how to separate those things from himself half the time, but he knew there was _something_ there to untangle. Guilt, though—yeah, that was home, that was stone number one.

So he let himself feel it and he didn’t say shit, because he wasn’t here to make friends and he wasn’t here to think about Sam. Sam, who was probably still back at the bunker trying to find some spell in the library, trying to think of the words that would get Dean to break out of this place and go home.

Yeah. That was why Dean wasn’t supposed to think about him.

Not that keeping quiet got him anywhere. Petey was still acting weird, but he didn’t do anything suspicious—or at least, not anything that was suspicious in the supernatural kind of way. Neither did any of the orderlies, or the nurses. Dean still felt antsy and uncomfortable in his skin, and when the nurse doled out some sleeping pills for him that night, he swallowed them without complaint.

 

 

\----

 

A scream jolted Dean out of the heavy fog of drugged-up sleep. He sat up hard, heart racing, the familiar throb of the Mark on his arm sharpened to a painful sting. For a couple seconds, he didn’t know where he was. The dark made it too easy to imagine he was back in his own room, with Sammy just down the corridor and Cas sitting up in one of the spare rooms, squinting in bafflement at some late-night TV show.

Then the noise reminded him.

Footsteps in the corridor, hushed conversation, slamming doors—and then the yells of the other guys, locked up in their own rooms, demanding to know what the hell was going on.

Dean ran to the door, pressed his face to the little window, and kept quiet. There were a bunch of orderlies in the corridor, plus a flash of white coat and dark hair, and the tone of the chatter out there was definitely _this is an emergency._

Fucking A.

There was movement. More orderlies. A stretcher. And then the unmistakable shape of a body covered by a sheet being carried up the corridor.

A hand slipped out from under the sheet with the movement of the stretcher. It belonged to a white dude, and Dean let out a selfish sigh of relief. Not TJ.

Because yeah, he would’ve felt like crap if the kid had gotten jumped by whatever monster Petey turned out to be, and he would’ve felt worse if the last thing Dean had said to him had been, _Shut up with the conspiracy crap._

So maybe he’d ended up making a friend here, after all.

 

 

\----

 

Dean didn’t get back to sleep, and by the sound of it, neither did anybody else on the ward. By morning he was yawning, gritty-eyed and wired, like he’d drunk half a pot of Sam’s nuclear coffee. Man, he missed that coffee.

He shuffled out to breakfast rubbing his eyes, and when TJ caught his eye and waved him over he gave a half-hearted smile for a peace offering.

TJ returned it briefly, but then the smile dropped from his face. “You hear what happened?” he asked. “Petey’s dead.”

Dean sat up in his chair. “That was Petey? In the corridor last night?”

His mind raced. He’d been so damn sure that Petey was the monster. The violence, the weird behavior—even ending up in this place. If you were some kind of supernatural freak and you grew up not knowing it, maybe you’d end up thinking you were nuts. Maybe you’d tell the cops that when they came to take you in.

But Petey was dead. Dean groaned and looked down at his breakfast.

He pushed his oatmeal around his bowl without eating it (seriously, after coffee, pancakes with bacon were next on the list of ‘things Dean Winchester would kill for’), and then it was medication time. The pills didn’t help any. They were the same fake Prozac as yesterday, handed out by the same grouchy nurse, and they made his head buzz, the throb of the Mark relentless on his skin. Every noise made him want to swing around and throw a punch.

Dean tried to keep a handle on his irritation. He tried not to point it at TJ, anyway. He still felt tight-wound and jumpy, and sure that anybody who looked would’ve been able to read the tension in his face. Lucky enough, anybody who might’ve noticed him acting weirder than usual was distracted by the Petey situation. First Driscoll, now him. Guys were muttering about serial killers, and TJ wasn’t the only one eyeing the staff with distrust.

After lunch, sitting in the dayroom, Dean watched a nurse come out of Demetriou’s office, clipboard clutched to her chest. She cast a quick look in Dean’s direction. Looked away again as soon as he caught her eye, but there was no missing the worried furrow of her brow.

Come to think of it, Dean thought he’d seen her earlier, talking to Grouchy Nurse. Hell, maybe he’d actually been as good as his word and asked her to look into Dean’s meds? Now that’d be a miracle.

The nurse didn’t come talk to him, though. She looked back once at Demetriou’s office door, then scribbled something down on her clipboard and headed back to the nurses’ station.

Dean turned away from the door, and had to duck to avoid getting smacked in the face.

TJ had been twitchy all day, getting distracted in the middle of sentences and looking over Dean’s shoulder at shit that wasn’t there. He’d stopped Dean to ask about voices that weren’t really speaking a couple times—and okay, so it had to be a good thing that he knew to ask, but it was a pretty damn worrying thing that he was hearing them at all. And that the doc didn’t seem to be doing a thing about it.

Now, TJ stood in the middle of the dayroom, arms raised like he was dancing, or praising the sun, or munching on magic mushrooms at Burning Man. He spun on the spot, eyes darting everywhere, not settling. Heads were starting to turn as the other guys in the dayroom figured out there was entertainment going on.

“Okay,” TJ said to nobody, and let out a delighted laugh. It was boyish and unguarded, polar opposite to the tight-wound, nervy way he’d been acting since they got him on the fake Prozac. “Okay, sure, I’ll dance with you. You’re pretty.”

He reached out, like he was caressing some invisible person’s face, and that pinged Dean as weird. From what TJ had told him, he heard voices a lot, but the only time he’d ever seen things was when his brother-in-law got possessed. Which hadn’t been a hallucination, even if TJ didn’t know that.

Maybe it wasn’t TJ’s brain that was doing this to him. Maybe it was whatever was in the fake meds.

Dean knew that the Mark wasn’t gonna get better by itself. That was why he was here. But the buzzing in his head, the angry energy itching under his skin, the way it had all ramped up the last couple days—maybe that wasn’t just him. Maybe it wasn’t even the Mark. Maybe he had a chance at—

Nah. It was dumb to think that way. Dangerous, too. If he was gonna worry about somebody, he could worry about TJ. At least the kid still had a chance at being saved.

“I’ll run with you,” TJ said to his invisible friend, eyes shining. “I’ll fight with you.” And without warning, he lurched at something invisible in midair, hands held out like claws.

His foot caught on a chair. He stumbled and landed on his knees with a thump. There was a ripple of laughter around the dayroom, and that finally got the attention of the guard nearest the door.

Dean was closer, though, and he reacted without thinking. He was at TJ’s side in a second, gripping his shoulder. “TJ,” he said. “TJ, dude, snap out of it.” He waved his hand in front of TJ’s face for emphasis, and the kid blinked a couple times and finally looked Dean in the eyes.

“Huh,” he said. Then, “Why am I on the floor?”

“Because you decided to take up invisible boxing and tripped over a chair. Little tip for you, okay—next time you wanna take an interpretive dance class? Don’t.”

TJ blinked again. “Not really clearing things up here.”

Dean frowned down at him. “You seriously don’t remember what just happened?”

“Looks that way.” TJ frowned. “It’s the drugs. It’s what they’re giving us. _They_ did this to me.”

That was more like it. Well, okay, not exactly, but at least the kid sounded like himself again.

A hand gripped Dean’s shoulder. He started, and a flash of rage burst through him and made him snarl and pull away, fist pulled back, ready to fight.

The guard standing over him lifted an eyebrow. “You wanna step away from the patient?”

Dean swallowed hard; swallowed down the sarcastic retort and the urge to forget where he was and throw the punch anyway. He stepped away.

The Mark whispered, _Coward_. He tried not to hear, and he waited for the surge of anger to fade.

But it stayed with him. It stayed with him all day, and he found himself nursing it inside of his chest after he’d been locked into his room with no news on how TJ was doing, after he’d climbed under the covers and tries to sleep. It was like it had somehow gotten into his bloodstream and travelled all around his body, so that there wasn’t a single part of him that wasn’t fizzing with it. It even cut through the Ambien haze that usually carried him off to unconsciousness, and his sleep was patchy, intercut with dreams that were vivid and HD-sharp.

He was in a forest somewhere. His first thought was Purgatory; but this place was all dark, living greens, a sliver of pale gold moon creeping up above the treetops. The miles of forest he’d trekked through with Benny and Cas had been muddy and gray, sickly twilight whatever time of day it was. Here, it was night, and he was running.

There were other people somewhere up ahead of him, and they were running, too. Pale figures, naked in the moonlight and streaked with blood. Dean looked down, and his own hands were bloody up to the wrists, fingernails caked with gore. He looked like he’d just lopped the head off of a vampire and then gone dumpster diving down its gullet.

He didn’t feel grossed out, though. He didn’t remember killing anything, or how he’d gotten the job, or who the victims had been. He didn’t even care that he didn’t remember; not really. There was just that buzzing in his veins, something howling for joy inside his skull. The Mark didn’t even hurt anymore. It burned on his arm, and it felt _good_. He was hyped up, every sense on alert, but without a target. He’d chase anywhere, hunt anything.

It was awesome.

One of the figures up ahead stopped and turned back to him. It was a chick, long curly hair falling in tangles over her shoulders. She stooped to pick something up from the ground and held it out to Dean.

A cup. Or a goblet, he guessed, like something you’d find on a witch’s altar. The dark liquid inside slopped out over the rim and down the naked chick’s hands as she tipped it in his direction.

“Drink,” she told him, smiling widely. “Don’t you wanna have any fun?”

“Rather have a beer,” he grumbled, on autopilot, but naked-chick just winked and pressed the cup into his hands. Then she was off again, running ahead of him into the woods.

And hell, it had been long enough since Dean had had a drink, and he was alive and expansive, possibility setting off fireworks inside his head. He raised the cup of wine to his lips and chugged it down. It dribbled over his chin, ran down his chest and got all mixed up with the blood on his hands and the mud on his feet—and yeah, he was definitely out of his head, because he didn’t even give a crap that he was covered in blood and filth. The fact that he would’ve cared, once, felt small and distant.

He tossed away the cup and caught up with the rest of the group. Naked-chick turned back to look at him, grinning.

“You see?” she said, and then she clasped his arm, her hand over the Mark. “It feels good to let go.”

Yeah. Yeah, it did.

There was a holler up ahead of him, and then the group went quiet. Dean nudged naked-chick with his elbow. “What’s going on?”

“They’ve found somebody.” There was something familiar about her voice, he thought, only he couldn’t place it. Her eyes were alight, and she pointed to a figure ahead of them in the trees. “Prey.”

Dean squinted, taking a moment to see where she was pointing in the dark.

Yeah, there was somebody there—a dude weaving down a narrow track, some kind of a ceramic jug dangling from one hand. He lifted it to his mouth as he staggered along, tipping the last couple drops into his mouth and then tossing it aside when it came up empty.

“What do you mean?” Dean asked the chick. “What are we gonna do?”

For a second, she clasped one of his bloody hands in her own. “You know,” she told him, and it sounded like a promise. The Mark throbbed with joy.

A whoop came up from the group ahead of them, and then they were running again—right at the drunk dude.

Drunk dude blinked a couple times, looked around—and before he had time to move, or even figure out what was going on, by the look of it, the frontrunners were on him.

They didn’t even throw punches, just overwhelmed the guy and bore him down to the forest floor by sheer force. Dean was at the back of the group, but he saw limbs flying, bared teeth, hands curled into claws. Blood and gouts of flesh flying.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, a small voice told him, _You need to stop this. Wrong kind of hunting_. The wine was making his head spin, like he’d just downed half a bottle of bourbon, and he thought he might be about to hurl.

 _Shut up_ , said the Mark, and he swallowed it back.

A figure in the heaving mass around the drunk dude—though Dean guessed he should start calling him the dead dude—turned and grinned at him. It was the chick he’d just spoken to. She lifted her hand and beckoned him over, shifting to one side to make space around the body. Her teeth were slicked with blood.

 _Make it stop_. The voice sounded like his own—only small, and broken, and weak. Like he used to be, before the Mark.

He went where she beckoned.

 

 

\----

 

Dean woke up retching. He was twisted up in the sheets and he flopped out of bed like a fish, shooting out a hand to save himself just in time to avoid faceplanting on the floor.

His head pounded. He was sweaty and cotton-mouthed with the worst hangover he’d had in months.

Only he hadn’t had a drink in weeks. Hell, even his dreams remembered that.

There was a voice still echoing in his ears, and when he blinked, he could see the chick with the bloody teeth waving at him over the dead guy’s body.

She’d definitely looked familiar, but Dean couldn’t figure it out. Now that he wasn’t in the dream anymore, the memory blurred. His head still buzzed and the Mark still throbbed, and he knew that he was missing something obvious, but the harder he tried to hold onto it, the faster it slipped away.

 

 

\----

 

He forced himself through breakfast. He held it together, swallowed his meds and fell in line and clenched his fists against the buzzing in his veins and ignored the little asshole whispers of the Mark so hard he could feel a vein in his temple throbbing. Eating his oatmeal felt like swallowing cotton wool, and holding it together without TJ to distract him was twice as hard as it had been before.

But he did it, and then he begged permission to head back to his room for a book so he could read (or okay, more likely, stare at the print without absorbing any of it) for an hour before group. He did his damn best not to grind his teeth as the guard looked him over, and he must have managed it, because eventually the guard nodded and said, “Five minutes.”

He was just planning to take a peek through the window of TJ’s room and then go get his book. Check out what was going on in there. That was all.

Before he got there, though, the door to TJ’s room swung open, and Dean ducked back into his own on instinct. He pressed himself against the door and peered out the window at an angle, so he wouldn’t be immediately visible to somebody walking down the corridor unless they were looking for him.

There was a flash of white coat as TJ’s door closed, and then Demetriou passed by him, her eyes on the chart she was holding in her hands.

She was smiling widely.

Something clenched up tight in Dean’s stomach. He caught a glimpse of the file, then, over her shoulder as she passed the door, and he blinked in surprise.

It didn’t look like a casefile. Dean had seen the ones in her office, and plenty of others in his time, but this didn’t have cramped, untidy doctor’s handwriting, or notes on medication or behavior, or admission reports, or anything else that he might’ve expected. He couldn’t read the doc’s handwriting, but that wasn’t because it was messy. It was all Greek symbols and sprawling vinelike designs, and a weird sketchy drawing of a chick with a sheet falling of her shoulders and showing her boobs. Her hands were curved into claws, and coated with blood.

Dean knew, then.

The knowing smile, the hair tumbling over her shoulders, the crazy forest. The chick from his dream.

It was her. Demetriou. Without the lab coat and the clipboard, with her hair all wild and her face smeared with bloody grime.

He tried to catch his breath.

Maybe it had just been a dream. Maybe his brain had imagined the Doc because she was the only woman he spoke to on the regular, these days. Maybe it didn’t mean anything.

Yeah, except that in Dean’s experience, dreams that didn’t mean anything were about as common as monsters that didn’t want to eat you for dinner. The Mark had been giving him nightmares for months, but that dream had been different.

Demetriou had something to do with it. She could’ve signed off on the fake drugs, too. Plus, she’d been giving Dean the creeps since the first time he spoke to her. He’d just put it down to the fact she was a shrink—but no. She was a hell of a lot worse than that.

And she’d just been alone in a room with TJ.

Dean caught his breath, and let himself out into the corridor. He looked left, right, left again, then opened the door to TJ’s room and slipped inside.

TJ was breathing. No blood, no shredded flesh, and Dean let out a breath of relief and sat down in the chair beside the bed.

There was no reaction from TJ. His eyes were half-closed, unfocused, like he was dozing. They must have gotten him pretty tranked up. Dean sat at his bedside a few minutes anyway, because those were a few minutes he could spend not thinking about the Mark or the way the new drugs itched under his skin.

He closed his eyes. Then opened them again at the sound of the door opening.

It wasn’t Demetriou. It was one of the nurses—the one he’d seen coming out of Demetriou’s office yesterday, now that he thought of it. She kind of stuck her head through the door and looked around for a moment before she walked in, an orderly trailing beside her, and Dean pretty much expected to be kicked out, only she didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to him, just frowned at her clipboard.

TJ stirred in his bed, then winced as he moved the leg he’d tripped on yesterday. He blinked a couple times.

“Hey, buddy,” Dean said. “How you feeling?”

TJ turned to face him, his eyes wide and distressed. “No,” he said. “No, I don’t wanna play. Leave him alone!” He twisted suddenly on the bed, like he was trying to get away from something. Dean reached out an arm to steady him, then remembered that that kind of stuff tended to get you hauled away and drugged up yourself in this place, and stopped with his hand hovering awkwardly in midair.

The nurse paused, lips pursed, then turned to the orderly who was with her. “This isn’t normal for him,” she said. “He was doing better until recently. Keep an eye on him. I’m gonna get him another dose of the sedative.”

“Doc just said not to.”

Dean frowned to himself, doing his best not to catch either of their eyes. Demetriou had said not to sedate TJ? But hell, if she was some monster that ate people, wouldn’t it be easier for her if he was docile and out of it? The Leviathan had spent months figuring out how to keep people drugged up for easy pickings.

But then what did the fake Prozac have to do with any of it? What was she even trying to do here?

“I know,” said the nurse. “I happen to think she’s made a bad call.”

The orderly shrugged. “Your funeral.” He turned to Dean, then, finally seeming to notice he was there. “Okay, visiting hour’s over.”

Dean sighed and got to his feet. Before the orderly could herd him out the door, TJ caught at his wrist.

“Dean.” First time the kid had recognized him since he walked in. Maybe he was finally breaking through it—the effect of wrong drugs, or the lack of the right drugs, whatever _it_ was. His voice was urgent. “Dean.”

“Yeah?” Dean turned back to him, and suddenly, he had to try hard not to think about the last time he’d been stuck in a place like this.

Sam drugged out on a hospital bed, saying _I love you_ because drugged out was the only time he could bear to say it. Ellen and Jo a few weeks dead. The Apocalypse still running at them down the tracks. He’d been angry and useless and hopeless and losing his shit, talking to a woman who didn’t even exist, and Sam had booped his freaking nose and some part of him, under all the deadening weight of the end of the world, had ached with it.

Sure; but that had been then. Five-years-ago Dean might have been useless and hopeless, but he hadn’t been the goddamn monster. Sam hadn’t been kidding himself when he said, _You’re my brother, and I love you_. Dean forced the memory away.

“You gotta remember what I told you,” TJ told him. His voice was urgent, and he gripped Dean’s wrist hard. “You gotta say no. You gotta stop them.”

“Okay, man,” Dean told him, as the nurse waved him out the way. “I’ll stop them. You just gotta tell me who they are.”

“It’s her,” said TJ. “The shrink. She’s—”

“Okay, that’s enough.” The orderly slapped a hand down on Dean’s shoulder, and before TJ could finish his sentence, Dean was being shoved out the room. The orderly shut the door in his face.

 _Break it down_ , whispered the Mark, or the part of Dean that it fed on. _You could do it. I’d give you the strength. Break it down and smash his face, then the nurse, then—_

He slapped a hand over it, as if it couldn’t get to him when he couldn’t see the angry red of it on his skin. He breathed in. Breathed out. Tried to sort through what TJ had said to him.

 _You gotta stop them_. Not, _You gotta stop her_. Were there more of them—like the whole crowd of people Dean had seen in his dream?

He didn’t know. All he knew was, he was gonna have to stop them. People were dying in here, and TJ might be next, and he couldn’t wait for suspicious medication nurse to figure out something was screwy here and call the authorities. But with Petey dead and TJ on lockdown and nobody else to tell him who the monster was, where was he supposed to start?

 

 

\----

 

He sat in the dayroom, holding a magazine open on the table in front of him. Maybe that would keep anyone from trying to talk to him right now. With the new meds still buzzing through his system, Dean needed all the concentration he could get.

Plus, he couldn’t exactly guarantee he wouldn’t snap and break somebody’s nose if they got in his face right now.

 _You gotta remember what I told you_. TJ had figured out something was screwy with the meds before Dean did. Maybe that was what he meant. Dean just couldn’t figure out how it fit into everything else here.

That nurse had come out of Demetriou’s office yesterday. Maybe she’d asked about the meds, but Dean’s hadn’t gotten changed back. And Demetriou had said not to give TJ any more sedatives, even though he’d come close to injuring himself yesterday.

Carefully, Dean got to his feet and wandered out of the dayroom and down the corridor. He did his best impression of dazed and out-of-it, shuffling his feet, timing his pace so he landed outside Demetriou’s office door just as the orderly doing his rounds disappeared around the bend in the corridor.

He glanced up and down the corridor, then tapped at the door.

No answer. And—thank fuck—it was unlocked. Dean checked the corridor one more time and slipped inside.

The cabinet was locked this time, not that she was likely to be keeping her freaky-ass plans where any nurse might come looking for them. Dean tried the desk drawer instead.

It opened, and for a second he thought, _Score_. Then he looked inside. Nothing but notepaper and pens, and a bag of freaking cashew nuts. Dean sighed.

Demetriou’s purse wasn’t on the desk, or under it, or hung up behind the door. She must have gone to lunch and forgotten to lock the office. Didn’t look like he was gonna find anything useful in here. He sighed and turned toward the doo, and that was when the casefile open on the desk caught his eye.

Petey’s file. Dean picked it up and rifled through the pages.

There wasn’t any of the weird Greek stuff he’d seen Demetriou looking at yesterday, but then some hunter would’ve already ganked her if she was dumb enough to leave that stuff lying around in plain sight. There was a prescription in there, though. Petey’s meds had been changed too, just last week. _Fluoxetine_ —which was Prozac, if Dean’s bathroom-cabinet-raiding memories served him right, and he was pretty sure they did. But Dean would’ve bet a hundred bucks it was really the same stuff she’d given to him, and TJ.

And there was something else behind it in the file. Petey’s autopsy report.

Cause of death was pretty obvious: Petey had been shredded, just like Driscoll. But there was something else, too.

His brain was… abnormal, the report said. Not the normal kind of abnormal, though. (Honestly, could you even find that stuff just by poking around inside somebody’s skull? Sounded kinda doubtful.) But Petey’s brain had been… sucked dry, almost. Whatever had killed him had clawed at his skull.

Like—well, like that mental hospital case he and Sam had worked years ago. That nurse who’d turned out to be a wraith, feeding the patients on her toxin and then feeding off of them in return.

Only, the wraith had been precise. The holes drilled in her victim’s heads had been small; just enough so she could feed. This was savage, more like a werewolf attack than a careful predator hiding her tracks.

Then again, if the Doc was the monster, she’d been careful enough getting the job here, picking out victims who’d already been tossed on the trash heap so that nobody would notice. The two halves didn’t fit.

It didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Maybe Sam’s nerd skills or Cas’s long memory could’ve helped him figure out what it was—but no. Dean wasn’t gonna put them in the line of fire. Not from whatever mystery monster was running around in here, and not from him.

 

 

\----

 

Demetriou’s office hadn’t told him much, but that had pointed to the meds, too. Dean guessed he could start there.

And it looked like all that time spent fighting back against the Mark had paid off, gotten him filed in the ‘good patient’ column, because the nurse didn’t bother to check under his tongue after they’d handed out the new meds that night. Dean kept his eyes down, obediently took his little paper cup, and didn’t swallow.

The capsule was sticky and gross by the time he got locked into his room, but he managed to pry it apart with thumb and forefinger and tip the contents out into his palm.

It was a green power. Looked more like a herb than something out of a lab. The smell of it was herby, too: sharp and pungent. He was pretty sure he’d smelled it in a witch’s kitchen or two over the years.

If he’d been at home in the bunker, he could’ve hit the books and narrowed down the list of suspects (though Sam, with his weird nerd-boner for plant lore, probably would’ve gotten there first.) Hell, Cas probably could’ve taken a sniff and announced exactly whose garden in what obscure region of Europe it had been harvested from.

But all Dean had was his own screwed-up brain. His head ached, and the Mark itched on his arm, and there was an insecty buzz in the back of his head, and he didn’t know where the hell to start.

He might’ve gotten away with not swallowing his meds, but his sleep wasn’t any better that night.

He dreamed of the forest again. The blood-chasing crowd and their victim; the chick with Demetriou’s face beckoning him to join them. She raised her hand to call him over, and blood dripped from her plum-painted fingernails.

 _Don’t go_ , warned the sensible voice in the back of his mind. _You know what they’re gonna do. Stay away from them_. It sounded kind of like TJ.

But Dean’s head swirled and the Mark throbbed and tugged at him, pulling him along like a magnet. Demetriou beckoned him again, and he went. The sweaty press of bodies drew him in, and somebody was tipping wine down his throat again, and it felt good to have his fists and feet meet flesh again, to curl his hands into fists and sink them into meat and blood.

It ran down his hands, warm and thick. He tasted it and couldn’t tell the difference between the blood and the wine he’d been drinking.

There was a small, cold knot of sickness in his gut. A little, scared frantic thing beating its wings against the back of his skull. But it was small, and the swirling in his head and the voice of the Mark were big, and they said, _more_.

The body at their feet was a bloody carcass. Dean wasn’t even sure if it had been a guy or a chick this time, and you sure couldn’t tell. Still the Mark throbbed, and the howl of the crowd agreed with it.

The noise hung in the air for a moment.

And then they were turning on each other. A clawed hand caught at his arm. He felt teeth dig into his thigh. All around him, the people in the crowd were tearing into each other, laughing high and wild. Blood spattered his face. He tasted it in his throat at same the moment a fist connected with his stomach, and didn’t know if it was his own or somebody else’s.

He started awake just as a bloodied hand gouged into his chest. He gasped for breath. The Mark burned.

He could hear the echo of Demetriou’s voice in his head again.

 _It feels good to let go_ , she’d said. And maybe it had, for a couple minutes back there in the dream. But here, in the real world, there was nothing but the pounding in his head and the throb of the Mark, and the sick, hollow fear that he wouldn’t be able to stop it. No: that he wouldn’t stop it.

 

 

\----

 

He skipped out on his meds again the next morning, but it didn’t stop the pounding in his head. His hands were shaking, and with TJ still locked away in his room, Dean found that he missed the conversation. Even before Driscoll got ganked, when TJ had just been shooting the shit in his general direction and Dean had been trying to ignore it, it had kind of helped. Kept him in the room, given him something to think about other than the Mark.

Shame he hadn’t appreciated it at the time.

It was hard to concentrate. Get his thoughts into any kind of shape, figure out what to do next. Without the Bunker’s library, or anybody else to talk it over with, his head span in circles. The clues he had—Demetriou; the dreams; the stinky herbs; the file with the weird Greek writing in it—didn’t match anything Dean had heard of before. One thing was pretty clear though. He wasn’t gonna find out anything more sitting on his ass in the dayroom.

He had the guards’ routines figured out pretty well by now. One of them would start letting his attention wander a couple minutes before the end of his shift, glancing at the clock and probably deciding what he was gonna eat for dinner and watch on TV when he got home. (Man, if Dean had known he’d ever be stuck in here with a dozen guys squabbling over what to watch on the single, miniscule TV in the dayroom, he never would’ve given Sam shit for his nature documentaries. At least you occasionally got to see a shark on those.) The guard who took over would be alert, three black coffees under his belt, so Dean needed to get out before he showed.

He sat and flipped idly through some car magazine—which, okay, maybe wasn’t the best choice, because he caught a flash of black-and-chrome and had to turn the page fast—while he waited for the clock to tick toward one PM and the guard to lose his concentration. The last couple minutes passed so slow it hurt, but they passed, and Dean got to his feet and shuffled down toward Demetriou’s office, keeping his pace carefully slow.

Nobody yelled at him to stop, and he let himself in and shut the door behind him carefully. The noise of the ward swallowed the sound, and he exhaled hard, a little shaky.

Not that Dean actually knew what he was looking for in here. A step-by-step flowchart with her evil plan laid out in handy boxes? A fake-Prozac recipe from the Great Big Monster Cookbook? He sighed and scrubbed a hand down his face. Where was he even supposed to start?

“Are you supposed to be in here?”

Dean blinked in surprise and span round. He hadn’t even heard the door open.

The woman standing there raised her hands, taking half a step back, and Dean realized he had a fist raised, ready to slug somebody in the face. He could’ve told himself it was just hunter instinct, just the fact that he wasn’t expecting anyone but Demetriou to come through that door, but he would’ve been kidding himself.

The chick in the doorway was wearing a lab coat, but she didn’t look familiar. She pushed a strand of dark hair out of her face and looked at him over the top of her glasses. “I’m gonna take that as a no,” she said.

Dean lowered his arm, and the woman’s eyes tracked the movement. She didn’t actually look freaked, though: there was the hint of a smile on her face, like he was a zoo animal that had just done something particularly interesting.

He fought back the shaking of his hands, the rage in his blood, and plastered on his cheekiest grin. Maybe he could flirt his way out of this.

Maybe he could get away before he hurt somebody.

“Sorry,” he said. “I was just looking for the Doc. Uh, Doctor Demetriou. Wanted to ask her about something.”

The woman in the doorway smiled and offered a hand. “Doctor Callas, she said. “I’m a friend of Doctor Demetriou’s, actually. She called me in for a consult.” Her hand was still held out, and Dean was pretty sure the doctors weren’t supposed to shake hands with the crazies in here, but she was staring at him expectantly, so he took it.

Callas didn’t shake his hand, though, just pulled it toward her, twisting his wrist so the Mark was uppermost. Her face lit up with delight, and Dean _knew_ , before she said anything.

“Oh,” she said. “You must be the patient she called me about.”

Dean swallowed dryly. “You can cut the crap,” he told her. “You ain’t a real shrink, and neither is your friend.”

Callas raised an eyebrow. She didn’t let go of his hand, and when Dean tried to pull away, her grip was like steel. “I resent that,” she said. “I studied hard for me qualifications. We both did. You could say madness is our specialty.”

“And,” said Demetriou, behind him—and where had she even come from? “She isn’t my friend. She’s my sister.”

Yeah: the resemblance was there, now he saw them side by side. Same height, same build, same waterfall of dark, shiny hair. Same creepy know-it-all smirk.

Same voices, too, just like the one that had beckoned to him in his dream.

“Well,” he tried, “don’t wanna interrupt your little family reunion. So why don’t I leave you ladies alone, and—”

Before he could finish his sentence, Demetriou’s hand was on his neck, her fingers firm against the skin. Then there was the sting of a needle, and blackness.

 

 

\----

 

Dean woke strapped down in a white room. He thought it was the same examination room they’d taken him to when he first arrived, only then, there had been a couple guards and a nurse who looked way too bored for the fact he was dealing with a guy who’d just offed a roomful of civilians. Now, the only other people in the room were Demetriou and the other fake doc. No: her sister. The other monster. They stood over him like a couple of Frankensteins getting ready to zap their creation to life.

One of them—Callas, Dean thought—ran her fingers over the raised brand of the Mark, and he shuddered. Her nails were painted the same dark red as Demetriou’s. Maybe it helped hide the blood underneath them.

“You’re back with us,” Demetriou said, her voice silky. “I was beginning think we’d have to start the fun without you.”

“That would be a shame,” Callas agreed, and stroked the Mark with her fingertip one more time. “After all, you are bringing something special to the party.”

The striplight overhead flickered, and it elongated her shadow on the wall, turning her fingers into talons. Or maybe that was just what they really looked like, whatever they were. Dean’s head was still spinning a little, and he wasn’t a hundred percent on whether he would’ve been able to tell the difference.

“What are you?” he got out. “You ain’t human. You killed those people. But you ain’t werewolves, and you ain’t vampires, and you ain’t wraiths. So humor me.”

“Wraiths?” Demetriou giggled. “They’re no fun.” Her voice was high and excited, her smile a little too wide, her usual all-knowing shrink act slipping like a mask. She sounded like she was drunk.

Callas made a face and nodded. “There’s nothing duller than eating dinner with a foodie. _We’re_ just here to have a good time.”

“To let go,” agreed Demetriou, stepping in close to him. She placed her hand over the Mark. “And you’re going to be such a good time, Dean.”

“My sister figured out you were a hunter pretty early on,” Callas chimed in. The way they piggybacked off of each other’s sentences was creepy. (For half a second, Dean wondered if he and Sam had ever freaked people out like that. Except they’d never been this easily on the same page. Apparently evil was good for family harmony. Who knew?) “You didn’t make much effort to hide the truth when you arrived here, did you? And that might’ve convinced the humans you were crazy, but we know better.”

“And you’re better than any regular old violent criminal. _This_ —” Demetriou pointed to the Mark “—has a real kick to it. Don’t suppose you’d tell me what it is? I want one for all my patients.” Her face was dreamy.

So, they got drunk on this? On hurting people?

Drunk meant unguarded, and the Mark gave a twinge on his arm. Opportunity. Hell, even if Dean wasn’t gonna escape from them, he could at least find out what he was getting ganked by. And if the Mark brought him back again, he’d know what he was dealing with afterward.

That might be a good thing. If he came back still pissed at Demetriou and Callas, they’d be first on his list. And if he was known for killing two pretty young doctors, he’d be slung in maximum security prison for sure this time. Maybe that way, nobody innocent would get hurt.

“Tell you what,” he managed. “Fair’s fair. You tell me what you are, I’ll tell you what I got here.”

Callas gave a negligent shrug, and looked at her sister. Demetriou nodded.

“You’ve heard of Bacchus?” Callas asked him.

“Uh, yeah. Titty bar in Vegas, right?”

She rolled her eyes. “And, more importantly, a god. _Our_ god.”

“Oh, great. Pissed-off pagan worshippers bitter that the Jesus brigade stole your thunder? Cry me a river.”

“Oh, we maenads are much more than that.” Demetriou held her hand up to the light—and now it definitely wasn’t a hand any more. It was a clawed talon, and Dean pictured it dripping with blood, like he’d seen it in his dream. “And tonight, we’re having a party.”

Callas clasped Demetriou’s clawed hand in her own, her eyes wide and shining. “A bacchanal! It’s been so long.”

Demetriou nodded, and let her hand fall. She turned away for a second, and when she faced them again, she was holding a goblet. It looked out of place in the hospital room, old-fashioned and ritual-y—and yeah, Dean had seen that in his dream, too. She set it down on the little table near his head, and pulled something from the pocket of her lab coat.

It was a little pack of green powder. The pungent smell of it hit Dean’s nostrils as soon as she opened it and tipped the contents into the wine. It was the same stinky herb concoction that had been in the fake meds—only this time, there was a whole lot more of it.

Demetriou swirled the mixture in the goblet and then raised it again. In the dream, Dean remembered drinking that stuff without question. Now, he gritted his teeth as she tilted it over his mouth.

“It’s been _so_ long,” Callas repeated, somewhere above him. “So long without the taste of ecstasy. Without divine madness. We’ll taste it again tonight.” She swayed back and forth on her feet, her smile wide, and Dean wanted to hurl.

His memories were slippery, hard to hold onto, but he kinda thought he’d maybe seen something in one of Bobby’s books about Bacchus and his followers. After the whole creepy-ass pagan god thing he and Sam had worked in Michigan, he’d figured he ought to know if there were more of them out there. Hell, Bacchus had sounded like a cool guy at first. Wine, women and song. Would’ve been pretty awesome, except Dean was pretty sure there had been something about blood sacrifices in there, too.

“So, what?” he got out. “You’re gonna rip into the rest of us like you did with Petey and Driscoll?”

“Eventually.” Demetriou smiled down at him. “Our god requires sacrifice. But first, we’re going to hunt together.” She paused, still smiling. “Our goal is ecstasy. Liberation from the senses. Where better to experience it than here?”

Dean actually snorted out loud. “You serious?”

Demetriou lifted an eyebrow in question.

“You see anything divine in here? I see a bunch of guys locked up because they hurt somebody. Or because they’re scared of hurting somebody. Or because somebody tried to hurt them and they got the blame. And I see a couple of nuthouse tourists who wouldn’t know how much it sucks to lose your shit even if their fancy-ass psychology degrees were real.”

He broke off, breathing hard. His heart was racing, his head still pounding, but for once, the Mark didn’t throb any harder than usual. Maybe that meant he would’ve been this pissed even without it.

Demetriou just gave him a look of fake sympathy. “I pity you, Dean. You can’t see beauty amid the ugliness.” She shrugged. “Doesn’t matter, though. This place gave us the perfect cover. In a ward full of violent men—well, violence is hardly a surprise, is it? I could experiment in peace here. And you and your friend TJ were our last experiments. Tonight, everybody on the ward is getting a new prescription—except for the new arrivals.” She raised the goblet again, and it came perilously close to spilling over. Dean clamped his mouth shut again.

“There are three new guys,” Callas said. “We’re hoping they’ll at least put up a fight.”

 _Fight_. The Mark pulsed anticipation through his veins—but somewhere on the other side of it, the cold knot of nausea in his gut was back. Sure, the three new guys could’ve been killers, or rapists, or worse. On the other hand, they could’ve been like TJ. People who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time and gotten the blame because some shrink somewhere had written a diagnosis next to their names. Or maybe they were somewhere in between. It wasn’t like the Freak Sisters seemed to give a crap.

And they were gonna drag everybody else on the ward in on it. Including TJ.

The kid wasn’t violent, whatever was wrong with his head. But he was gonna end up with blood on his hands because of some monster again. He’d probably blame himself for it again, too.

Dean couldn’t let that happen.

Problem was, he couldn’t stop it, either. Not while his ass was still strapped to the damn table, anyway.

Maybe he could talk his way out of it. If he could just keep a handle on himself long enough to take them out, that would be better than nothing, right? One human dude—even one with the Mark—had to be easier for the guards to take down than two supernatural creeps with giant claws. Plus there was one of him and two of them. Might still be a human body count, but it would be smaller. Probably.

 _Probably_ wasn’t good enough. Dean knew that. But it was all he had.

“Fine,” he said. “Count me in.”

Demetriou did the eyebrow thing again. So she wasn’t drunk enough to have lost all her skepticism yet. Still, it wasn’t like Dean had any other options here, so he plastered on a smile and plowed on.

“I mean, what the hell, right? Just a bunch of crazies in here anyway. And this thing?” He jerked his chin in the direction of the Mark. “Well, I won’t bore you with the details, but it gets thirsty. Been a while since it had a kill. Gotta be honest; I was starting to climb the walls in here anyway.” That part wasn’t a lie, after all.

Demetriou smiled and cupped the side of his face with her hand. Dean did his damnedest not to duck away from it, to keep his grin fixed in place. He probably looked kind of unhinged—but hell, that might be an advantage here.

“You talk a good fight, Dean,” Demetriou told him. “I’d almost be tempted to let you out.” She tilted her head. “But I’m afraid you’re still not one of us. You might do something dumb. So I’m going to need you to do something for me, first.” She raised the goblet again. “Drink.”

“Oh, hell no,” he said, and clamped his mouth shut.

Demetriou shrugged, stroking his cheek with her thumbnail. The she pinched his nostrils shut.

The Mark burned with rage. Dean struggled against the straps as hard as he could, but they didn’t give, just dug tighter and tighter into his skin. He held his breath for as long as he could, but black spots started to dance in front of his eyes and his lungs started to hurt—and finally, he had to gasp for breath.

Demetriou smirked in triumph. The wine slopped out of the goblet and into his mouth, down his throat. It was strong and sweet and thick, and warm as blood.

Somewhere, vaguely, he was aware of Callas unfastening the straps. The wild laughter of the maenads echoing around the room. Voices and footsteps, running, out in the corridor.

Then, there was nothing but a haze of red.

 

 

\----

 

Red. The trees. The running. The press of bodies and the smell of blood. Howls of joy and pain.

It was a jumble of sound and sensation. He didn’t know how much time had passed.

The next thing Dean was really aware of, through the haze, was somebody on the sidelines looking in.

The stillness of the figure caught his attention, pulled him away from the crowd. He tuned out the laughter, the screaming, and turned to look at it.

And blinked. Suddenly, he caught a flash of corridor. The plain white walls of the hospital, spattered with blood. A whiff of antiseptic and cleaning fluid cut through the loamy, bloody scents of the forest, and Dean remembered that he hadn’t always been here. He’d been in a hospital room. Flickering striplight, Demetriou and Callas standing over him. Torn between the excited throb of the Mark and the cold feeling of sickness.

He’d been afraid for… somebody. Sam? It was usually Sam.

But the figure huddled on the sidelines wasn’t Sam. Not tall enough, too dark-skinned and too skinny. Dean squinted, steadied himself against the wall, and the figure came into focus.

It was TJ. He stood pressed against the wall, hugging himself, eyes wide and fearful, watching the crowd in the corridor like he wasn’t sure if they were real. Or like he was the only sane man in the room. Like it wasn’t getting to him like it was the rest of them.

Dean paused, thinking. It had been the wine Demetriou poured in his mouth that made him start seeing weird shit. And the wine had had those herbs in it—same as the fake Prozac.

But Dean had been skipping out on his meds. And TJ hadn’t taken any in days, tranked up in his room with a nurse or an orderly keeping watch. Demetriou probably hadn’t gotten the chance to slip the herbs to him without being seen. Maybe that was why he wasn’t in the crowd with the rest of them.

Dean took a deep breath and pulled away from the press of bodies, leaning up against the wall beside TJ.

TJ started and looked around at him, eyes wide—but his expression turned relieved when his eyes landed on Dean.

“Dean!” he said. “Dude, thank God you’re here. Are you seeing this?” He glanced back at the crowd, eyes darting uncertainly.

Dean reached out, carefully, and clasped his shoulder. “Yeah, man I’m seeing it. A bunch of guys yelling and fighting, and—and trees, right?”

TJ blinked. “I don’t see any trees, man. I dreamed about them, a couple nights ago—and I saw them in the dayroom, before I fell over. But not now.”

“Okay.” Dean nodded, half to himself. “Okay. So no trees.” He paused. “Did you drink any of that stuff the Doc was giving out? The wine?”

TJ shook his head. “No way, man. I told you, I don’t trust her.”

Dean let out a breath. “Good. Okay, well—don’t.”

“Yeah, you don’t gotta tell me that,” TJ said. “But the rest of it—the Doc and that other woman? Their hands? Do you see that?”

Dean took a breath. He focused in on TJ’s face, on what he was saying, and his head cleared a little, the throb of the Mark dying down. TJ had ended up here in the first place because his sister had gone back on her story, convinced him what he’d seen was a symptom and not a monster. More than likely, she hadn’t even meant to lie; just convinced herself that what she’d seen couldn’t be real, because it was crazy. But she’d convinced TJ he was crazy, too, and now he was stuck in the middle of a whole other mess of supernatural crap, not even trusting his own eyes.

Yeah: Dean couldn’t lie to him a second time.

He nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “I see it too. And that ain’t the drugs. Demetriou—she’s not human, and her sister ain’t either. You figured that out, right?”

TJ gave a short nod. “I wasn’t sure, but—yeah. Yeah, I figured.”

Dean took a breath. “And what you saw before you came here? Your brother-in-law? That was real, too. It wasn’t a hallucination. It was a demon. It took control of his body, made him do stuff he never would’ve if he had the choice. That’s what they do.”

TJ stared at him. “You’re not screwing with me?”

“Nah.” Dean shook his head a little. “But you knew that already, right?”

TJ nodded slightly. “How do you know about it?” he asked, then.

Dean gave a snort. “Trust me, we don’t got time for even half the story. Let’s just say there’s a reason I ended up in this place.”

Thankfully, TJ didn’t push him. Not that Dean would’ve been too worried about unlocking his new pal’s tragic backstory in the middle of the Freak Sisters’ Magical Murder Party, either. TJ just huddled in on himself, eyes turned down in despair.

“We’re screwed, aren’t we?” he asked. “We’re gonna die in here.”

His helplessness made the Mark twinge. He was hunched over, making himself small like a prey animal, and the Mark whispered, _It would be easy. Put the kid out of his misery._

Dean fought it down. Felt, for a moment, a flash of anger that was separate from the fuzz in his head and the pull of the Mark. Or anyway, an anger that felt like his own.

He looked up, looked TJ in the eyes. “No way,” he said. “We ain’t dying in here. You ain’t, anyway.”

“But they ain’t human. How are we supposed to stop them?”

Dean looked up, eyes following the crowd down the hall until he picked out Demetriou and Callas.

In his dream, the crowd had turned on each other after their victims. They’d been in a frenzy, not even looking like they recognized each other. And Dean didn’t know how the hell you were supposed to kill a maenad, but those wicked clawed hands looked pretty damn effective.

“Okay,” he said. “This is gonna sound pretty crazy, but I’m gonna need you to trust me. Can you do that?”

TJ hesitated a moment, and Dean couldn’t exactly blame him. But then he nodded.

Dean let out a sigh of relief. It was more than he deserved.

 

 

\----

 

“Hey! Doc!” Dean raised his arm and waved. His voice was artificially loud and bright, and it echoed in the corridor even over the crowd of bodies.

Some of them weren’t moving any more. He swallowed hard.

Demetriou’s head whipped round. She probably hadn’t been expecting to see him there. They’d cut through the deserted dayroom to meet the head of the crowd from the other side, Demetriou and Callas shoulder to shoulder, their clawed hands dripping with blood.

“Hey!” TJ yelled, from the other side of the dayroom. “Over here!”

Callas turned to look at him. Dean met his eyes over the crowd, and he nodded.

Dean took off running. He heard TJ’s footsteps headed in the other direction. The noise of the crowd and the maenads’ laughter, spiralling wildly through the air. He kept his head down and ran, heart thumping in time with his footsteps, breath coming quick and hoarse. There was crowd noise behind him—around half of the group, he figured, following on behind Demetriou. The other half had gone after TJ, then, just like they’d planned.

Up ahead of him, he still saw trees when he blinked. Like he was a prey animal, running from a wolf in the forest. He could still smell the antiseptic, though, and his footsteps echoed off of the walls.

The noise of the other half faded, then grew louder again as Dean rounded a corner, the two groups circling back toward each other. He kept running—and, just for a moment the throb of the Mark was gone, and its voice was silent.

“Dean!” He could see TJ up ahead, running full pelt toward him, Callas on his heels.

“We got this!” he yelled back. “C’mon!”

They hurtled toward each other.

At the last second before they would’ve collided, Dean veered to the right, in through the open door of Demetriou’s office.

TJ followed half a second behind him and slammed the door. Dean put his shoulder against it and scrabbled for the bolt. It rattled with the volume of footsteps outside—but then, through the frosted window, he saw two clawed shadows slam into each other, their hands raised, howling with laughter.

They gouged and tore at one another, and around them other shadows threw punches and kicks. The noise was deafening. Dean held his breath. He could feel TJ shaking beside him.

Then, one of the clawed bodies slumped forward, its head lolling lifelessly on its neck. A second later, the other fell forward into its arms, and they both sank out of sight.

There was a deafening silence.

 

 

\----

 

They let a couple minutes pass before they looked out the door. TJ was still, his eyes squeezed shut. Dean worked the bolt loose cautiously, then stepped back to let the door open.

A lifeless hand flopped in through the gap as he did so. It wasn’t a claw anymore, but it was coated in blood, and its fingernails were painted the color of ripe plums.

Dean swallowed down a gag and stepped over the bodies, scanning the corridor.

There were a couple people on the floor. Dean couldn’t tell whether or not they were breathing. Most of the guys, though, sat or stood looking various degrees of dazed, blinking like the lights had just been switched on.

There were a couple of guards in among them; even a dude in nurse’s scrubs. The Freak Sisters hadn’t just gotten to the patients, then.

The staff wouldn’t have taken the fake Prozac—but maybe they’d drunk the wine. Or maybe they’d just gotten caught up in the frenzy. Dean made a face and stepped out into the corridor.

“You can come out, man,” he told TJ. “It’s—” He paused. It’s over, was what he’d been about to say, only once you knew monsters were real, it was kind of never over. “Nobody’s gonna hurt you out here,” he managed, finally.

TJ stuck his head around the door, then stepped out into the corridor, grimacing as the toe of his hospital-issue slipper caught on a trailing limb. “Shit,” he breathed out.

Dean nodded. “’S about right.” He glanced over at TJ, meeting his eyes. “I, uh—sorry you had to see this crap, man.”

TJ looked down for a moment, then back up. “Yeah,” he said. “I mean—not all this.” He gestured down the corridor. “But knowing I wasn’t seeing stuff back there—and with, with the demon? It’s kind of a relief.” He paused. “I can’t explain it, but it kinda—felt different than when I hear the voices. I got a handle on that stuff, most of the time. But this—I thought I was getting worse. And now I know that ain’t it.” TJ looked down. “Pretty selfish, huh?”

“No.” Dean squeezed his shoulder. “Look,” he said. “I ain’t gonna lie. Knowing about this stuff fucks you up. But—” He paused. “I dunno what it’s like to have what you got. But I do know what it’s like to stop trusting yourself. It sucks. Don’t feel bad about getting it back.”

TJ half-smiled and looked at his feet. He didn’t exactly look convinced, but Dean didn’t exactly know that he sounded convincing.

Still, after a second, TJ looked up and met his eyes. “So,” he said. “What are you gonna do now?”

“Now?”

TJ looked down the corridor. “Kinda looks like most of the guards are in here. Nobody guarding this place right now. You could get out.”

Dean raised an eyebrow. “That what you’re gonna do?”

TJ looked at him. “And end up in max security if they ever found me again? No thanks.”

“I know people,” Dean found himself saying. “People who run credit card scams, make fake IDs… they could set you up.”

“What, like witness protection?”

“I guess.”

“Yeah, the problem with witness protection is you never get to see your family again.” TJ looked down. “Plus, I kinda need my meds.” He glanced back at Dean, then. “But you could get outta here. Doc’s office is still unlocked. You could call somebody. Use her keycard to get out.”

“Somebody oughta call the cops,” Dean pointed out, and TJ nodded.

“Yeah. But nobody’s killing each other right now. So if somebody was gonna call the cops, they could probably give you a head start.”

Dean breathed in, shakily, and pressed his hand over the Mark. He saw TJ catch the movement, but the kid still didn’t push it, just waited patiently.

It was quiet, for now. It wouldn’t be quiet for long. But maybe—if he could keep a handle on it, like he had in here. Maybe, if he could keep a hold on the other parts of himself, the ones that the Mark damped into silence. Maybe, then—well. He probably wouldn’t be okay. He definitely wouldn’t be normal. But he wouldn’t be a monster, either.

TJ stood aside, making room for him to get back in the office. Dean hesitated a second longer, then stepped inside.

The phone was shaky in his hand. He weighed it there for a second, the Mark still angry red on his arm.

Then he dialed Sam’s number.

**Author's Note:**

> Talk to me? [LJ](http://anactoria.livejournal.com) | [Tumblr](http://anactorya.tumblr.com)


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